


Alas, Earwax

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: draco dormiens nunquam titillandus [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Primeval
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, the wizarding world post-1998 is full of child soldiers and traumatised Muggleborns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 12:06:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 53,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3289757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the members of the anomaly team(s) always draw the short straw, whether they’re witches, wizards, Squibs, or just plain Muggles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A Secret Santa for Bella. :) Thanks to Luka for beta’ing ~50,000 words in three days, although not for enabling me when I laid this idea of demonic proportions before her and said ‘it’s far too long, I oughtn’t’ and then sniggering disgracefully when I complained about how long it was taking. The title derives from an incident in the first Harry Potter book, where Dumbledore comes to the hospital wing to talk to Harry about his traumatic experiences and is invited to share in the sweets Harry’s friends have brought him. Remarking on a packet of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, he says that he always gets the revolting flavours, and yet he keeps trying, hoping for something more palatable; he then tastes one, and his reaction is “Alas, earwax.” I thought such persistence was a virtue most of these characters possessed.

            The gate’s latch fell away, rusted into uselessness, and its padlock clattered to the floor. Nick Cutter pushed the gate open slowly and warily, thereby demonstrating that in nearly three years on the anomaly project he had learnt some caution. Not very much, since he had successfully lost his entire security detail _and_ Danny Quinn, and was accompanied only by Connor, but some. In 2005, he would just have shoved the bloody gate open and had done with it.

 

            “Professor,” Connor said, from the other end of a grimy alleyway. “Professor, I don’t think this is a very good idea. I mean, Captain Becker will do his nut. Shouldn’t we maybe -”

 

            “One minute, lad,” Cutter said distantly, edging through the gate into an abandoned, concrete-floored courtyard. Maybe once upon a time this had been some kind of communal space for the people who’d lived on this estate, but now it was abandoned, rancid puddles and streaks of rust, the only signs of life some moss and gangling weeds –

 

            And the _bloody great unicorn_ standing in the middle of the courtyard. Cutter stared, trying to take in its spiralling horn, the silvery, otherworldly sheen to its pale body, the huge dark eyes, like any normal horse’s. There was no such thing as unicorns. It had to be a normal horse, right, with a horn stuck to its forehead, poor creature. If Abby were still around, the lass would be furious. It sounded real enough; there was nothing remotely ethereal about the clopping noises Cutter had heard, the ones that had led him to investigate the gate’s latch. There were more otherworldly Monty Python sketches.

 

            “Please, somebody,” Cutter said aloud. “Tell me that is not a unicorn.”

 

            “Fine, Professor,” a dead man said, “it’s not a unicorn,” and darkness swallowed Cutter from the ankles upwards.

 

            “Ryan?” he almost said, but the darkness twined around his tongue and stilled it, and night fell behind his eyes, and then there was no more speaking.

 

***

 

            “This is a disgrace,” Sir James Lester said, stalking from end to end of his office. The Ministry hadn’t seen fit to allocate them much space, claiming that housing them and their work in the London complex was only a temporary measure, so he didn’t have to stalk very far.

 

            Captain Ryan stood at parade rest and watched him stalk in silence.

 

            Lester came to a halt and rounded on Ryan. “How many times have we Confounded Cutter now? It can’t go on. The man doesn’t have that many brain cells to lose.”

 

            “He’s not stupid,” Stephen Hart blurted, as if compelled to say something, anything, in Cutter’s defence. This was a mistake; Lester turned on him.

 

            “No, Hart, you’re quite right, he isn’t stupid. He’s a bloody _moron_ with a brain the size of one of Merlin’s sainted warts!” Lester pinched the bridge of his nose, and his hand strayed out to the corner of his oversized, over-elaborate desk. “Miss Maitland, get in touch with Captain Becker, tell him to keep Cutter on a tighter leash.” Abby opened her mouth to say something, but Lester wasn’t paying attention; he had already switched focus, returning that laser glare to Stephen. Abby and Caroline rolled their eyes at each other. “This is getting beyond an embarrassment. I suppose Connor Temple spotted you too, Hart?”

 

            “No,” Stephen said.

 

            “Really? You surprise me.” Lester’s stare would have made any basilisk proud. “You’re supposed to be _dead_ , Hart. And so are you, Ryan. I will not have any unscheduled resurrections. Do I make myself clear?”

 

            “Crystal, sir,” said Caroline Steel, smooth as only a Slytherin could be. “But, speaking of schedules, can I point out that Abby is spending the next week in Romania? Sarah or I could track down Captain Becker.”

 

            “Romania?” Lester wrinkled his nose. “What for?”

 

            “Large animal handling course,” Stephen said, folding his arms. “You signed off on it. Abby’s great at what she does, but there’s a knack to handling something the size of a dragon. Or a T. rex.”

 

            Lester treated this remark with due disdain. “Please see to it yourself, Miss Steel. Dr Page has never spent a substantial length of time living as a Muggle, and I don’t think any of us want a repeat of the Oystercard incident, do we?”

 

            Ryan suppressed a wince.

 

            “Well,” Caroline said, in a tone calculated to remind everyone that she had been responsible for getting Sarah out of that pickle, “no.” She flashed Lester a razor-bright smile.

 

            “Exactly,” Lester said, flashing one back as he sat down behind his desk. The overstuffed leather chair creaked. “Off you go. You’re not being paid to stand in my office.”       

 

            Abby and Caroline slid past Ryan and out of the office door, dark head and bleach-blonde already together and talking in undertones. Ryan suspected duelling clubs which he wasn’t supposed to know about, so he waited half a beat before following them out, and when he realised that Stephen hadn’t followed him he paused and waited yet another.

 

            “Claudia Brown worries about Temple, you know,” Lester was saying, deceptively casual.

 

            “I’m not surprised,” Stephen said coolly.

 

            A purple memo flew down the corridor, aiming directly for Lester’s office. Ryan grabbed it out of the air.

 

            “She’s concerned that he’s seeing ghosts,” Lester informed Stephen. “She worries about his ability to adapt. She understands that he idolised you, but she thinks he needs to grieve and move on.”

 

            The memo attempted to bite Ryan, who resisted. There was a long and horrible pause.

 

            “That’s how healing works,” Lester continued. “Considering the events of the last decade, you must know that. Stop letting Connor Temple catch glimpses of you at anomalies. It does neither of you any good.”

 

            There was a further pause.

 

            “Close the door behind you when you leave,” Lester said.

 

            There were footsteps, and Stephen emerged from the office. He did not slam the heavy wooden door behind him, but he closed it fairly definitely, and when he met Ryan’s eyes his face was a storm.

 

            Ryan let go of the memo reflexively, and half-held out a hand to Stephen. “Come on. Let’s go and get a coffee.”

 

            “Cafeteria’ll be full of Potterheads this time of day,” Stephen said.

 

            “Not if we go across to the Counting House and use theirs.”

 

            Stephen’s full mouth twitched in something that might have been meant to be a smile. “Okay, then.”

 

            The two men walked down the corridor to the lift, their footsteps heavy and final. Behind them, the purple paper memo fluttered fruitlessly at Lester’s door – crushed, battered, and almost silent. After a few moments, the door opened, and the memo shot at Lester so abruptly that it hit him in the face and fell to the floor, where it flickered.

 

            Lester sighed and bent down to pick it up. He glanced at the sender’s name, then noted the damage. His eyebrows shot up, and he glanced down the corridor at Stephen and Ryan’s retreating backs.

 

            “Dear me,” Lester murmured, and closed the door neatly behind him.

 

***

 

            The ARC was always quiet at this time of night, but never dark. Despite the anomaly project’s thin resources, and the empty labs in their building, there was always somebody there and a team on standby; the Leek debacle had made it completely clear that their first duty was to the innocent people who got caught up in the anomalies, however strongly Nick felt about the science. “It’ll save people in the long run!” he would say, and yes, Jenny would agree, yes it would, but the only run that matters when there are raptors in a hospice is the run to safety.

 

            Jenny left the brightness of the rec room with her cup of coffee, ignoring Becker and his lap full of gun paraphernalia patiently listening to Connor talking at length about Star Wars, and headed back towards the atrium and her office. It was only seven o’clock at night, but of course, most people had left, so the lights were low – or even off – in most offices. Most corridors remained softly lit, day and night, with at least enough of a glow to show you where you were going, and the whole system was kept in perfect order.

 

            Jenny had not been in the ARC under attack, but she’d seen the few remaining staff-members who had been flinch at flickering lights. She thought she knew why there was never so much as a fused bulb in the building, and why Claudia always managed to find room in the budget for proper lighting. Her half-sister had her faults, but a lack of persistence and consideration for others wasn’t among them.  

 

            Jenny glanced at the ADD as she headed towards the ramp, and saw that it was quiescent, blue whirling screensaver lighting up the atrium attended only by one bored technician. Her gaze drifted past it, to the memorial wall that curved around the atrium beneath the ramp, and when she realised that her feet had halted automatically she sighed at herself and went over to look at it, too.

 

            There were too many names. There weren’t supposed to be any names – this part of the building had taken heavy superficial damage, but the structure itself was fine, and no official arrangements had been made to turn this part of the wall into a memorial. Someone with tidy handwriting and a ruler had just picked up a black marker and started to write down names on the backlit plastic. They hadn’t done the whole list at once – it would have taken far too long – but it hadn’t taken them more than a couple of weeks to complete.

 

            They could have found out who it was; it shouldn’t have been too difficult. James Lester would have done or said something, put a stop to it and arranged some kind of official memorial. Claudia had turned a blind eye for several days, as the number of names increased, and had then got Norman to put up metal letters in some of the space that the world’s most solemn graffiti artist had not yet reached.

 

            IN MEMORY, the letters said simply, steel against the plastic, and they made the marker names look as if they were meant to be there.

 

            Jenny drifted towards the end of the list, sipping her coffee, until she reached a column about two-thirds of the way through and her eyes lighted on the name she was looking for. _Stephen Hart_ , they read. 

 

            Jenny just stood there and stared at the letters for a bit, breathing regular and even, sipping her coffee at carefully measured intervals. Stephen Hart had been… a loss, she thought, in a way she wasn’t quite equipped to understand. Jenny had barely known him, after all: events had led him to withdraw emotionally from the team not long before she had joined the ARC, and all Jenny had to go on for an understanding of what he had meant was Claudia’s stumbling, furrowed-brow descriptions, coaxed out of her over large glasses of red wine, and the negative space that he had left behind. His death had been as much of a crushing blow to Connor as Abby’s departure had been, and Jenny often wondered if Abby’s decision to leave the ARC had had more to do with Stephen’s death than Abby had let on at the time. She had noticed a sickly tension between the two of them at times, very different to Abby and Connor’s relationship or Stephen and Connor’s easy rapport. It was as nothing to the jagged edges of Nick and Stephen’s broken relationship, bits of which Jenny was still cutting her fingers on after months with Nick, but it had still been present.

 

            Jenny heard familiar footsteps behind her and smiled into the rim of her cardboard cup when a familiar broad-palmed hand landed lightly on the small of her back. “Hello, Nick. Have you done your reports? I’m not protecting you from my sister if you haven’t, you know.”

 

            “Ach, I’m not worried about Claudia,” Nick said, neatly evading the question of his paperwork, which was backed up to the point of insanity. That was another thing; Nick’s capacity to get work done to a deadline had foundered after the break with Stephen, and in the wake of his death it had almost shrivelled away entirely. Lorraine Wickes was good at threatening it out of him, but Jenny would have preferred that to be unnecessary.

 

            “Hmm,” Jenny said, and the two of them fell into silence. Nick’s eyes were focussed on the wall, flicking over the names and lingering over Stephen’s.

 

            “I miss him, you know,” Nick said unexpectedly, and Jenny’s heart stuttered in her chest.

 

            Stephen had died a year ago. Nick had gone to the funeral, but he had never made direct reference to the man who had been his closest companion for the best part of a decade.

 

            `Jenny reached out for his hand and held on tight for a moment before letting it go. “I have a press release to work on,” she said. “Were you about to leave?”

 

            “Hoping to come home with you, actually,” Nick said, blue eyes crinkling with amusement at the corners. “I can wait, if you’d like.”

 

            Jenny let her smile spread across her face, slow like watercolour over paper. “I would like that. I shouldn’t be more than forty-five minutes.”

 

            “I’ll go and get Pennyforth’s bloody book,” Nick said, turning to go back to his office. “It’s a piece of crap, but I’ll have to think of something polite to say about it.”

 

            “Supposing you can find it in that tip you call a desk,” Jenny said. “Alternatively, you could use the time to work on that report you haven’t done yet.”

 

            “I could,” Nick said shiftily, making good his escape. Jenny laughed at him, and the ADD technician in her seat jumped. Already halfway into the complex of labs that led off the atrium’s lower floor, Nick spun on his heel to grin at Jenny and give her his cheekiest wink, and Jenny shook her head and made her way up the ramp, back to the offices at the top.

 

            Her own, of course, was unoccupied, but so was the half of Claudia’s that was occupied by Lorraine Wickes, gatekeeper, office manager and general Valkyrie of office supplies. Jenny wasn’t sure where she’d come from, but suspected either the security services or James Lester and his mysterious network of hints, tips and quiet suggestions. Jenny paused outside her office and looked across to where Claudia and Lorraine had collected around Claudia’s desk and were conferring over sheets of paper. On a whim, Jenny pushed through the half-open glass door into the office, walked straight through the glass partition into Claudia’s inner sanctum, and joined them.

 

            “- I smell coffee,” Claudia said suddenly, breaking off from whatever she’d been talking to Lorraine about, and both Lorraine and Claudia looked at Jenny as if she bore nectar and the favour of several minor gods in her wake.

 

            “It’s mine,” Jenny told them. “Sorry.”

 

            Lorraine tucked a smile into the corner of her wide plum mouth and returned her attention to the sheets of paper on the desk, marking them up with a red pen.

 

            Claudia rolled her eyes and flicked her soft brown hair back over her shoulder; her fringe needed a trim, but doubtless Claudia would say she didn’t have time. In many ways, Claudia hadn’t changed very much from the earnest fifteen-year-old Jenny had met for the first time at her mother’s urging. Neither half-sister had been particularly impressed with the other – at least, not then. “Have a heart, Jenny.”

           

            Jenny rolled her eyes back at her and handed over the coffee cup. Claudia, because she had manners, did not actually drain it before handing it back, but she certainly gulped in a fairly desperate fashion.

 

            “What time did you two come into work?” Jenny demanded, folding her arms.

 

            “None of your business,” Claudia said, and Lorraine said nothing, which was meant to convey the same point.

 

            Jenny raised an eyebrow – a move she’d been practising in the mirror, and using on Claudia, since that fateful first meeting.

 

            “Early,” Claudia conceded. “You know how much there is to do, Jen.”

 

            “Don’t call me Jen,” Jenny reminded her. “You sound like Mike.”

 

            Lorraine’s dark eyebrows flickered. Of course – Jenny’s previous relationship had been on the rocks eighteen months ago when Lorraine was hired, and Jenny had hardly ever worn her ring to work or referred to Mike in anyone’s presence, let alone that of a minor administrative professional who had been reliable, trustworthy, and not very noticeable until Leek had gone up in flames and Lorraine had stepped forward and filled his place. Jenny had known her a little, but certainly not well enough to have been telling Lorraine her relationship woes; as it happened, she hadn’t shared them with anyone at work.

 

            “Fiancé,” Claudia explained.

 

            “Ex-fiancé,” Jenny corrected, with a certain satisfaction.

 

            “Ah,” Lorraine said, and spread out the sheets of paper. “Mi-”

 

            “ _Claudia_.” Claudia tried to scowl ferociously. As an objective older sister, Jenny thought she was getting better at it. “For the hundredth time. You can call me Miss Brown when you’re freezing out ministers, but not otherwise.”

 

            “Claudia,” Lorraine corrected, almost smoothly. “I think if we move the ten o’clock with the biologists on Wednesday the third to four o’clock, the Home Secretary’s visit can go in the ten o’clock slot without too much…” Lorraine visibly cast around for the correct word to describe the impact of the Home Secretary, a much-disliked figure in the ARC for her budget cuts and general inability to grasp the concept of an ongoing national emergency that couldn’t be solved by declaring some kind of rhetorical war on it.

 

            “Disruption,” Claudia supplied.

 

            _To Claudia’s peace of mind_ , Jenny mentally filled in. “To the work of national importance performed by our scientists and military contingent,” Jenny said aloud. Both the other women nodded sagely at this blatant piece of disingenuous fluff.

 

            “And in light of that,” Lorraine finished, “I suggest your lunch with Sir James should be supper on the Wednesday or lunch on the Thursday, instead of lunch on the Monday.”

 

            Claudia squinted down at the printed-out diary all over her desk. “That works. Will you confirm that with him, Lorraine?”

 

            Lorraine nodded.

 

            “And then get out of the building and get some sleep, both of you,” Jenny said. “Claudia, am I going to have to buy you another tube of Touche Eclat for those dark circles, because you could fit Captain Becker’s Bergen in them.”

 

            Claudia gave her a filthy look. “No, thank you.” Her brown eyes darted sideways, attention evidently caught by something else. “Is that Nick trying to sneak up the ramp?”

 

            Jenny turned around and looked. Nick was – sauntering? Strolling? – up the ramp, eyes fixed casually on the middle distance, Pennyforth’s book on the terror birds of the Eocene and a much-abused notebook tucked under one arm. “No. He’s trying to walk calmly and casually.”

 

            “Do you think he’s done those reports?”

 

            “You tell me,” Jenny said dryly, watching Nick sidle into her office and forage through her desk for a ballpoint pen. The temperature in the room dropped almost perceptibly at her remark, and both half-sisters glanced at Lorraine. The other woman had her back to both at them, but the lines of her shoulders radiated disapproval.

 

            Jenny shared a look with Claudia, and they both decided not to pursue it.

 

            “You see a lot of James Lester, don’t you?” Jenny asked.

 

            “Not really,” Claudia said. “We have lunch occasionally. Once or twice he’s emailed me a bit of useful gossip. It… helps.”

 

            Jenny arched an eyebrow.

 

            Claudia huffed out a sigh, half-frustration, half-resignation, and yanked absently on the lower edge of her blush-pink top, drawing out some of the wrinkles. Jenny made a mental note to take her shopping for something a little more sophisticated. Claudia was twenty-seven years old and functionally a CEO; she needed to stop dressing like a soft-edged fast-streamer, and start wearing some of the sharp edges she’d acquired on the outside. Maybe that was what those lunches with Lester were about.  “Lester has… connections, accumulated knowledge, friends that I don’t. He knows where all the bodies are buried. I wouldn’t have this job if he hadn’t put it in my hands, and it’s – a big deal. I’m getting better at knowing it for myself, but…”

 

            “Why go looking for graves with a spade when you have a metal detector?” Jenny suggested facetiously, mind absently running through some of the outlets and brands she had known like the back of her hand when she was still handling fashion and the odd stray politician, as opposed to dinosaurs and the odd stray politician. Claudia would look pretty in a few Chloé pieces to lend a little difference to a wardrobe chiefly composed of M&S, but pretty wasn’t the object. Some basics from Zara might be a start, and not so expensive that Claudia with her instinctively thrifty habits would recoil at once…

 

            Claudia wrinkled her nose. “Thanks, Jenny, that’s charming. Now I know how Nick won you over with pick-up lines like _I have a hot date with a dead shark_.”

 

            “In fairness,” Lorraine murmured, flicking through the assembled sheets of the diary, “a sense of humour was the only way to deal with how that thing smelled.”

 

            “Point taken,” Jenny said, and smiled at Lorraine, who smiled back. “I have a press release to write. Enjoy your mentoring lunch, Claudia.”

 

            “It’s not for weeks,” Claudia said, and then blinked. “Mentoring? Would you call it that?”

 

            Jenny gave her a patient look.

 

            Claudia returned a sisterly bug-eyed stare, and shrugged her shoulders. “I think he just wants to make sure I haven’t broken the anomaly project in his absence.”

 

            “Please,” Jenny said. “Give yourself a little credit.” She shook herself, and looked over into her office, where Nick had taken up residence in a corner seat and was pulling a variety of faces at Pennyforth’s book as he jotted down notes. Jenny could almost hear the grumpy Scottish rumbling from where she stood. “I have a press release to finish off, and then I’m going home. See you tomorrow.”

 

            “See you tomorrow,” Claudia echoed dutifully, but Lorraine had brought her a folder of something to look at, wordlessly indicating something with a pen, and Claudia’s attention was already elsewhere.

 

            Jenny bit back a sigh as she slipped out of her half-sister’s office and into her own. She knew how much work it was, keeping the ARC afloat, but sometimes she worried about how much work Claudia put into it.

 

            “Penny for them, lass,” Nick said, without looking up.

 

            “They’re not worth that much, Nick,” Jenny said, collapsing into her office chair. “And don’t call me lass at work.”

 

            “Aye, sorry,” Nick said, evidently not really present.

 

            Jenny cast her eyes heavenwards, and reached for her press release.


	2. Chapter 2

            Abby waited for the lift to clear of night-shift Aurors – the newbies, young and bright-eyed and chattering about having seen Harry Potter in action once, the old hands, sulking in the corners about the new no-smoking rule, and the rest, Abby’s own contemporaries, wearing their scars lightly – and stepped in. They all made her feel old and beaten down, except for the one or two who had known her in the late 1990s, their eyes meeting hers with a wry half-smile and then darting away. _Look, here we are; the Snatchers didn’t get us after all. We got them instead. Let’s pretend it never happened – not to us, anyway._

 

             Abby’s wrist twinged, and she hissed between her teeth, rubbing the offending limb and staring sightlessly at the lift’s rattling grate as it twisted towards the ground floor.

 

            “Sore?” said a carefully casual voice, and Abby bit her tongue and felt worse. The lift stopped at a floor, and a small group of Hit Wizards swaggered in. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement’s best, brightest, and most trigger-happy, Abby thought. The guys who wanted to be Aurors and weren’t quite there, and – crucially - knew it.

 

            “Old break,” she told Caroline Steel, meeting those opal eyes as calmly as she could. It was the same lie she’d told hundreds of Muggle colleagues over the years, culminating in Nick Cutter, in Connor Temple, in Claudia Brown, when something caught her funny and old hurts pained her. She led a sufficiently active lifestyle that it was believable, although Ditzy Owen had once remarked that the break had healed extremely well if it was no longer remotely visible on an x-ray. And it was just easier, these days, to say ‘old break’ instead of ‘spell damage’.

 

            Caroline nodded, perfect dark ringlets bouncing, her face showing no sign that she knew Abby was lying, although the duplicitous cow certainly did. It still stung, that Abby hadn’t recognised Caroline as a fellow witch when she’d strolled into Connor’s life, and even though she understood why Lester had ordered Caroline’s undercover work she still resented Caroline’s behaviour, not to mention the smooth poise, the gift for manipulating situations to her benefit, the perfect outfits and make-up, the undeniable duelling skill. Caroline had apologised for everything she’d done, but Abby couldn’t help but wonder if she was really sincere; Caroline had made a redacted but unusually comprehensive version of her file available to her new colleagues when she joined James Lester’s reformed magical anomaly project, and Abby had read every word. Someone who had survived what Caroline had done and thrived to become an Unspeakable, kept her high-flying life on the right track and continued to succeed, needed to be capable of lying with at least three faces at once. Abby had no doubt that Caroline could do that, and a year after the fight at Leek’s bunker when Caroline had revealed herself as a witch by pulling out a wand and Summoning Rex to safety before transfiguring her jacket into a blanket for him, Abby remained suspicious that she might be doing that. 

 

            Circe’s _knickers_ , Abby couldn’t bloody _believe_ she was still working with the woman. Had she lost all self-respect, to still be in a job alongside someone she used to hate so absolutely? Worse yet, Abby couldn’t believe that some days, when the wind blew in the right direction and the moon was in the correct quarter, she even liked Caroline. The fact that she had actually consented to attend a duelling club with her, just for a little practise to keep both their hands in, was completely beyond Abby’s comprehension on the best of days, and today wasn’t the best of days. Abby flirted with the thought of quitting the Athena Collective right then and there in a Ministry lift with Padma Patil who was in a corner going over her legal brief and her lipstick with equal care, and at least four Hit Wizards in the other corner, all of whom would be happy to arrest any of James Lester’s motley mob for belonging to an illegal duelling club.

 

            Then she realised that she was staring with concentration at one of the Hit Wizards’ left elbows, and it was unnerving everyone except Caroline, who was never more than startled by anything other than the occasional small reptile, and Padma, who had spared her a cursory glance when the Hit Wizards started to shuffle around before evidently deciding that she was less dangerous than attending Hogwarts at the same time as Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and therefore to be ignored. Abby sometimes envied the apparent bulletproof confidence of that generation, and then she remembered that she was supposed to belong to it.

 

            “Bad day?” Caroline said with sympathy.

 

            “No,” Abby snapped, and then realised that she was being covered for and managed a small, rough sigh. “Just… you know how it is.” She rubbed her wrist again and shrugged lightly.

 

            “It’s always rough with the colder weather,” Caroline agreed. “Funny how some kinds of curses react badly to the chill, isn’t it?”

 

            “Yeah,” Abby said, twitching as she forced herself to relax. Bloody Caroline casually telling everyone and their Crup all her secrets. “Every year I tell myself, this is the year I go to the Healer and get something for it, and every year I just don’t have time.”

 

            “Weren’t you decent at Potions?” Padma said, surprisingly, since Abby had been in the year below Padma at Hogwarts and Padma had never given much indication of knowing she existed. “You should be able to brew something up.”

 

            Abby curled her toes in her boots, desperately uncomfortable at the amount of truth she was being obliged to tell. “I’d rather get it checked out by a professional. The last time I tried to treat my own spell damage I turned myself blue and thought the world was upside down. You ever tried catching the Tube when you think the Oystercard circles are on the ceiling and your skin’s blue? I’m not doing that again.”

 

            Padma gave her a profoundly disappointed look. “You could Apparate.”

 

            “Or I could splinch myself,” Abby said. “No thank you.”

 

            Padma’s face did something which indicated that she thought Abby lacked moral fibre, and she turned her attention back to her brief.

 

            “How’s Parvati these days?” Caroline said chattily. “I haven’t heard from her since our girls’ night in June.” Her change of subject released Abby from the conversation, allowing her to stare at her boots and quietly wish herself anywhere but in this tiny bloody lift which ought to be on the sodding ground floor by now. The Hit Wizards were no longer paying her any attention, or at least, the attention they were paying her was duly respectful and didn’t make it look like they were considering arresting her.

 

            “Fine,” Padma replied, bestowing a brief smile on Caroline. “Enjoying Mumbai and her fiancée. I mentioned you were in town when we last fire-called and she says hello, by the way, I almost forgot.”

 

            Abby had spent enough time in the Ravenclaw common room, and crossed her path often enough, to have seen Padma studying; she didn’t believe for one single moment that Padma had almost forgotten anything. 

 

            “Oh, give her my love when you next hear from her,” Caroline smiled. “And best of luck with the wedding. Are you going to Fleur’s networking evening next week?”

 

            Padma resettled the dragonhide folder in her arms, clearly setting her brief aside. “I was thinking about it. I’ve got a Law Society dinner, I might not be able to make it, but then again if Fleur Delacour’s holding a networking do then nobody interesting will be at the dinner.”

 

            “You should come!” Caroline said. “I’ve seen the guest list, it looks great.”

 

            Padma cracked a grin. “I don’t know how you find these things out, Caroline.”

 

            “Finding things out is my job,” Caroline told her with a wink. “And I’m very good at my job.”

 

            “Slytherin forever?”

 

            “Absolutely,” Caroline answered without hesitation, but Abby picked up on the little hint of tension in her stance and the sudden interest from the Hit Wizards. Almost automatically, she looked up and glared at the nearest one, who caught her eye and hesitated.

 

            Abby’s fingers tapped lightly on the wand holster at her hip and she narrowed her eyes, and before Abby could get into a fight with the Ministry’s most highly trained law enforcement personnel the lift finally reached the ground floor and came to a screeching halt. Abby pushed her way out aggressively, leaving Caroline, Padma and the Hit Wizards to dispose themselves as they wished, and made a beeline for the nearest Floo. Merlin, _look_ at her – protecting _Caroline Steel_ –

 

            Caroline Steel caught up with her as she reached the tail end of the small queue, behind a wizard in polka dots, trousers of his robes cut fashionably skinny like Muggle jeans. “I’m sorry about that.”

 

            “Which bit?” Abby said, folding her arms.

 

            “Most of it,” Caroline said.

 

            Abby snorted, half-disarmed. “Fine. Apology accepted.”

 

            Caroline adjusted her handbag. “Are you going to see Sarah? I owe her a coffee.”

 

            “Yeah, she’s back from the Bodleian today, I said I’d meet her at the train.” Abby ignored the implicit invitation.

 

            Caroline frowned. “Isn’t the Bodleian a Muggle library?”

 

            “That’s what I said, but she yelled something about being late and Apparated out of the flat.” Abby shrugged. “Didn’t answer me. I assume she got what she was after or I’d have had at least two pissed-off owls.” She shifted from foot to foot and sighed as the wizard two people in front of them painstakingly consulted a Floo map for the exact name of his destination’s nearest fireplace. By the look of the scroll of parchment he had in his hands, it was probably right out in Zone Six. “I hope she’s meeting me at the train, anyway, she forgot her keys and I’m Portkeying out to Romania early tomorrow.”

 

            Caroline smiled, charming and full of teeth. “Leaving me stuck with the world’s soppiest not-yet-a-couple and Lester. Thanks very much for that, Abby.”

 

            Abby rolled her eyes. “You’ll live. You’re better with Lester than I am, anyway.”

 

            “He respects you a lot more than he does me.” The wizard rolled up his Floo map and leapt into the flames, yelling something indistinct that would probably leave him rolling out of a fireplace in Cumbria and setting off somebody’s burglar alarm. Caroline and Abby, both hardened Londoners who knew the names of all their destinations and pronounced them clearly, sighed shortly in unison.

 

            “You know,” Caroline observed, tapping one toe with delicate irritation, “of all the things I would have expected a war to destroy, the wizarding public’s ability to use public transport isn’t one of them. It’s been ten years. You’d think people would have re-learned how to use the Floo system, now it isn’t going to let the Death Eaters in.”

 

            “The more you know,” Abby said, and then her jaw dropped as the next wizard shuffled forwards to step into the flames. “Is that Fudge-up? God, he looks old!”

 

            Caroline stared at Cornelius Fudge, who almost fell into the Floo as he called his destination. “It is. Merlin, he looks like he’s two hundred and sixty. What’s he doing here?”

 

             “Whining about his pension again?” Abby suggested. The Daily Prophet had been loudly scandalised by Fudge’s attempts to get an already generous pension beefed up: Abby had read the Quibbler’s long-form report on the moral ambiguity of the Ministry’s attitude to its old hands, shuffled quietly out of the way because of the things they’d done to innocent people only a decade ago and paid off, which played it with a bit more nuance. Then again, there wasn’t much nuance to go around, especially not when it came to Fudge-up, who had been categorically useless.

 

            Caroline gave a wicked little laugh, and the polka-dotted wizard followed Fudge into the Floo. “You’re off to Romania early, right? See you next Wednesday.” She hesitated. “Fleur Delacour’s thing is on the Thursday…”

 

            “No,” Abby said.

 

            “Professor Grubbly-Plank will be there. And Luna Lovegood. And Chandra Scamander. I could get you in…”

 

            “No,” Abby repeated. “Thanks. But no.”

 

            She turned into the Floo, saying “Victoria Station,” as she went, and over her shoulder she caught a glimpse of Caroline, chewing uncertainly on her lower lip.

 

 

            Victoria Station was heaving with wizarding commuters, most of them dressed strangely enough – to Abby’s Muggleborn eyes – to get startled looks in any city other than London, and all of them clogging up the tiny wizarding enclave in the station. Abby tumbled out of the Floo grate, found her footing, and slipped out past the wizarding ticket queues through the maintenance door that led into the main station. Sarah’s Muggle-world skills required work, but she wasn’t a stupid woman, and it hadn’t taken her long to pick up the basics of Muggle transport. In fairness to her, the Oystercard incident was isolated and couldn’t have been predicted – even Stephen, who had lived entirely as a Muggle between 1997 and 2000, had had no idea that it was possible. Sarah transfiguring her Oystercard into a pen in a quiet corner of the Docklands Light Railway had made perfect sense at the time, since none of them had had a pen to hand, and nobody could possibly have known that that would wipe the card of any credit on it, causing problems at the other end of the journey as Transport for London refused to believe that Sarah had touched in with a valid card.

 

            So Sarah should be perfectly capable of catching a simple train back from Oxford, supposing that she hadn’t lost her ticket, missed her train or forgotten that she was meant to be travelling at all. Abby cast a glance at the station clock and the arrivals board, and noted with trepidation that it was several minutes past the Oxford train’s arrival time, and Sarah was nowhere to be seen. Abby stood on tip-toe and scanned the crowds, and was profoundly relieved to see Sarah sidling past a school group and heading for the ticket barrier. Abby waved, and Sarah’s long, solemn face lit up with one of her all-consuming grins. She waved back, wand clearly visible in her hand, along with several other small items.

 

            Abby slapped her face with an open palm and despaired for the future of the Statute of Secrecy. Even she had the wand-holster at her hip charmed to resemble a really dorky mobile-phone holder.

 

            Sarah stuffed her wand, phone, wallet, bag of – _owl treats_? - and notebook back into her capacious handbag, hoisted it onto her shoulder with an audible rattle and thud that made the hoodie-clad teenager beside her stare, and fed her ticket to the barrier. “Abs! Nice of you to meet me. Had a good day?”

 

            “Ha,” Abby said, smiling toothily at the teenager, who raised his eyes heavenwards and scuttled away, muttering something about fuckin’ loonies. “Medium to crap. I’ll tell you when we get home. How was the Bodleian?”

 

            “Great, great,” Sarah said, tucking hanks of silky black hair behind her ears and straightening her leather jacket. She then made a determined attempt to walk through the nearest wall, evidently having forgotten that this wasn’t Paddington, where the wizarding half of the station was entered by walking through a very similar wall.

 

            Abby grabbed her by the back of her jacket and propelled her towards the station exit. “We live in Pimlico, Sarah. It’s not that long a walk.”

 

            Sarah grinned and rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Whatever. Anyway, yes, great time at the Bodleian, Samson Smith is a twat but he’s a good librarian, and he’s, you know, less of a twat than he was at school, so it was fine. I got all the books I wanted, and some decent loan terms, too. He thinks I’m some kind of spy now. James Bond, licensed to read very long books in Victorian English.”

 

            Abby marked up a point to Stephen, who seemed to be occupying himself after the loss of his easy, geeky friendship with Connor by educating Sarah in Muggle pop culture. There were some strange lacunae in his knowledge, Abby had never met anyone else who readily confused the Spice Girls with Girls Aloud, but he was pretty sound on films. And Abby had to admit that the team movie night with _Jurassic Park_ a few months ago had been the first time that they’d really felt like a team, instead of the leftovers of Lester’s curiously idealistic, never fully realised dream of magical-Muggle cooperation.

 

            “Samson Smith? Zacharias Smith’s brother?” Abby remembered Zacharias Smith from the Battle of Hogwarts, and wouldn’t, personally, have called him a twat; she had many ruder words for someone who fled for the exits and trampled smaller children during an evacuation. But Rivkah Smith had lost limbs at the Snatchers’ hands for defending a Muggleborn friend, and it was always possible that Samson was more like his sister than his brother.

 

            Sarah shrugged. “No idea. Probably? Who is Zacharias Smith?”

 

            “A twat,” Abby said, since discussing war and evacuation tended to attract attention on London streets, particularly if you were small, female and didn’t look as if you had ever conformed to military discipline in your life. “I was wondering if there was a family resemblance.”

 

            “Tallish, blond, sticky-up nose?” Sarah asked.

 

            Abby summoned up an image of the offending Zacharias and pursed her mouth. “Maybe? Sounds sort of like him. Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about Smiths.”

 

            Sarah stopped dead, and her wheelie case – which wasn’t rolling along because she was pulling it, and settled with a suspiciously heavy thud onto all four wheels – stopped with her. “Hang on. Have we got food in the fridge?”

 

            Abby looked at the Marks and Spencer Sarah had singled out and sighed. “Yes, we’ve got food in the fridge, Sarah. Why, did you want something special for supper?”

 

            “No,” Sarah said cheerfully. “Actually, I was going to suggest we order in, but you’re going to Romania in three days –”

 

            “Tomorrow,” Abby corrected, having grasped that Sarah was mentally stuck several days ago, when she had left for Oxford in a cloud of dust and small stones.

 

            “- tomorrow,” Sarah said seamlessly, “and I thought I might get something in so I don’t have to go shopping for a bit, it’s going to take forever to get through this lot –” Sarah patted her case protectively – “and I’ll forget to eat, otherwise.”

 

            “Fine,” Abby said, and followed her into the Marks and Spencer while Sarah devastated the supermarket aisles. Her style of shopping was best described as chaotic, and Abby, who adhered to lists and budgets and meal plans with the kind of strict care that having the bailiffs in as a child had taught her, was left to follow along behind shaking her head slightly.

 

            Sarah bought enough food to last her several days and they resumed their trip home, Abby having surreptitiously charmed the shopping bags to weigh less. They were living in a flat in Sarah’s name, one of several properties Sarah’s insanely rich pureblood family owned; the Page fortune had been made in flying carpets at least two centuries ago, a long-dead male Page forebear benefiting from his unusually good Arabic and acquiring both a near-monopoly on the trade and a Persian wife. As far as Abby knew, the Page family still traded in flying carpets – overseas, where the things weren’t banned imports, the use of which was strictly forbidden outside the home of the owner or in the presence of a Muggle. There was certainly at least one active flying carpet on the floor of the flat, which Abby had found out the hard way not long after moving in.

 

            Sarah herself, heaving her case up the steps as Abby unlocked the gracious, white-painted building’s black front door, had no connection with the family business. Nor had Abby ever heard her speak of any family other than in passing, except for a Great-Aunt Viola who had visited and pronounced Abby ‘more than acceptable, Sarah, how nice that your taste in young women is looking up.’ Abby thought that Sarah’s firm stance against children had probably had more to do with the apparent estrangement than lesbianism, since Sarah had once casually mentioned one of her cousins and added ‘you know, the one who was nearly mine and Cymbeline’s sperm donor – except Cym and I didn’t get married after all, and I don’t want kids anyway – Abby, are you choking? Haven’t I told that story before?’

 

            Anyway, Abby thought, carrying shopping bags upstairs while Sarah floated the case and handbag up after her, trying unsuccessfully to read her post and levitate large items of luggage, Abby really didn’t care about Sarah’s batshit family. The fact that Sarah was friendly, smart, and more than willing to offer her cheap houseroom in a really nice flat was a lot more relevant than any stray Page connections or any flying carpets. Abby had found somewhere temporary to live after leaving the flat she had shared with Connor, but it had stretched her finances and there’d been mould in the bathroom and a sleazy landlord. It was hardly the end of the world, considering that she’d spent the end of 1997 and half of 1998 on various broken sofas, in mildewed tents, and on cold floors, but Abby had gone a bit soft in the intervening decade, and after the anomaly project’s break-up the manky bathroom and wankerish landlord had felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sarah’s bathroom was immaculate, thanks to a house-elf who came twice a week and left the place spotless and Abby feeling guilty, and Sarah was an excellent flatmate.

 

            A bat-bogey fluttered moistly down the stairwell and dropped to the floor with a messy squelch. Abby dropped the shopping bags, drew her wand, and peered upstairs, where – it was becoming increasingly apparent – a fracas was in progress. At least, one party was perpetrating a fracas; the other looked as if he couldn’t care less, jogging lightly down the stairs without a care in the world and without a single bat-bogey besmirching his tailored suit.

 

            Abby stepped out of the way of Blaise Zabini, who looked thoroughly bored, and was sauntering down the stairs under a hail of minor hexes from his distraught host on the floor above, who was shouting something through floods of tears. All the hexes missed; one bounced off a wall and broke a mirror, narrowly missing Sarah’s head. Sarah’s reflexes had improved enormously since she’d joined the re-formed magical anomaly project, so she was on the floor before Abby could even consider shouting “Down!”

 

            Abby decided that enough was enough. “ _Expelliarmus_ ,” she said, and deprived her upstairs neighbour of his own wand.

 

            “Fucking bitch!” sobbed the aforementioned neighbour.

 

            “There are kids living in this building,” Sarah said from the floor, voice high with displeasure. “You could have hit someone! Don’t think we won’t report you to the MLE.”

 

            “Like I care about the fucking MLE!” shouted the neighbour, and ran downstairs, narrowly avoiding trampling Sarah. “Blaise. Blaise!”

 

            The front door slammed shut.

 

            “ _Blaise_!”

 

            Sarah scrambled off the floor and let herself into the flat, dragging shopping and luggage in with her, and Abby popped upstairs to leave the man’s wand in his flat, thoughtfully closing his gaping front door behind her. She had no idea if he’d taken his keys, but hoped he hadn’t. When she returned to the flat, she found Sarah espousing a similar opinion, and also writing an official letter of complaint to Magical Law Enforcement.

 

            “Let’s hope he gets an ASBO,” Abby said, stroking Sarah’s owl with one careful forefinger. An aristocratic tawny, it bore up gracefully under her attentions.

 

            “What’s an ASBO?” Sarah said, waving the note around to dry it before attaching it to the owl’s leg and flinging the window wide open to release the owl. Abby winced, but fortunately it was now well after dark, and the tawny wasn’t clearly visible in the gloom of the evening. Also, the chances of somebody looking directly up and seeing the owl escape from a window were slim.

 

            Abby was still explaining what an ASBO was, perched on the kitchen counter eating a yoghurt while Sarah unpacked the shopping, when there was a clattering at the kitchen window and not one, but two owls clamoured to be let in.

 

            “That’s Stephen’s,” Sarah said as Abby opened the window, letting Sarah’s Re-Harakhte and the strange owl in. Re-Harakhte flew to his perch at once, but the strange owl landed on Abby’s jeans-clad leg, talons digging in, and held out a leg of its own.

 

            “I didn’t think Stephen had an owl.” Abby struggled with untying the attached note, which had clearly been secured by someone really anxious about the safety of their post.

 

            “I took him shopping for one last weekend,” Sarah said, and shot Abby a conspiratorial look out of liquid dark eyes. “If you ask me, he just wants to write secret letters to Ryan.”

 

            “They work together,” Abby said, “they see each other every day, why –”

 

            “Some things,” Sarah intoned, “are too serious to say aloud. Like ‘those thighstraps make me want to do filthy things to you, how do you feel about sexy zoologists?’”

 

            Abby spluttered with laughter as Stephen’s owl hopped off her leg and flitted over to the perch, which Re-Harakhte permitted it to share. “You are so weird, why do I even live with you?”

 

            “It’s my charm and wit,” Sarah said, winking. “Wit beyond measure being woman’s greatest treasure and all that. What does the note say?”

 

            Abby folded it back up again. “Stephen wants to know if we’ve got dinner plans, because he and Ryan are thinking of going to the Leaky Cauldron.”

 

            Sarah forked her fingers through her hair, drawing it back into a messy ponytail, and blinked at Abby. “Do we? I mean, not when I last checked.”

 

            “We were going to get food in,” Abby said, and tapped the note on the counter.

 

            “Hannah Abbott at the Leaky Cauldron does boxes to take away,” Sarah pointed out. “If you ask very nicely. How nicely do you think Stephen can ask?”

 

            Abby grinned. “I’ll tell him to take special care to flutter his eyelashes.” She scribbled a response in biro on the back of Stephen’s note and whistled for Stephen’s owl, which flew over and held out its      leg. Abby re-attached the note and let the owl back out. Stephen sent back an affirmative within ten minutes, and a request that Abby and Sarah feed Darwin.

 

            “Darwin?” Sarah said blankly, “what kind of a name is that for an owl?”

 

            “Oh God,” Abby said, and issued a brief lesson on the history of evolutionary thought.

 

            They fed the owl and dispersed to their own rooms; Abby had left hers in a state after oversleeping that morning and Sarah had a great deal of unpacking to do. Abby finished her tidying, went to investigate the laundry basket and discovered Sarah stacking piles of books around her in the spacious, walnut-panelled study. She was sitting cross-legged on the flying carpet, which was hovering at knee-height.

 

            “Have we got space for those on the shelves?” Abby asked.

 

            “Yup,” Sarah said, tongue caught between her teeth, and jerked her chin up at the bookshelves. Abby stuck her head inside the room and looked up, where a new row of shelving had been added.

 

            “How did you do that?” Abby demanded. The ceiling hadn’t got any higher.

 

            Sarah wrinkled her nose and shrugged without looking up from the book she was flicking through. “I was always good at Charms.” She set that last book down on a stack and made a definite sort of hand movement; the carpet started to float gently upwards. “And I know the spells on this place inside out.” The carpet stopped at about the height of Abby’s eyes, and Sarah began to slide the stacks of books onto the shelves, before sticking Post-it notes with scribbled words on to the shelves next to the stacks of books; they were evidently separated by subject. She tapped each note and muttered something, and then said “Morgana’s tits!” very loudly.

 

            Abby, who had got bored of watching her play the librarian and was halfway to the kitchen, retraced her steps. “What?”

 

            Sarah glowered at her shelves and the former Post-it notes. “Those are supposed to be brass!”

 

            Abby stared at her. “And…?”

 

            “They’re ivory!”

 

            Abby thought long and hard about this. “So long as it didn’t come off an elephant?” she tried.

 

            “But I got the spell _wrong_.” Sarah stuffed her wand behind her ear. “I’ll have to practise it, some time.”

 

            “How often do you have to transfigure Post-it notes into brass plates?” Abby demanded, fascinated.

           

            “I used to work in the library at the Salem Institute,” Sarah said, referring to the postgraduate institution in America where she’d earned her Master’s and doctorate in wizarding history, myth and legend, with special emphasis on magical creatures and a thesis on the relationship between Ancient Egyptian sorcerers, magical creatures and Ancient Egyptian theology and politics. “We were forever re-organising.”

 

            “Well, come down off the ceiling,” Abby said. “Ryan and Stephen should be here soon, and the flat’s a bit of a mess.”

 

            “It is?” Sarah said, and then arched an eyebrow at Abby. “By whose standards?”

 

            “Mine,” Abby said. “If I left you to decide how often we tidied the place, the house-elves would have to excavate you from your papers and books.”

 

            “Sad but true,” Sarah said, and made another gesture. The carpet lowered itself slowly to the floor, and Sarah unfolded herself – hissing as she stretched out her calves and hamstrings – and stood.

 

            “You’ve got to teach me how to do that,” Abby remarked, eyeing the carpet.

 

            “There’s a knack,” Sarah said, unnecessarily. Sarah had taken her to St Mungo’s when Abby had accidentally activated the carpet and plastered herself against the ceiling, inadvertently destroying an ugly chandelier. Abby, concussed and confused, hadn’t felt equal to inventing a cover story for a Muggle hospital, and Sarah had never considered going anywhere other than Mungo’s.

 

            “I noticed,” Abby said.

 

            “You’ve obviously got the talent, though!” Sarah said cheerfully.

 

            “That’s one way of putting it,” Abby said, and the doorbell went off like the hounds of hell.


	3. Chapter 3

            Several minutes later, Abby removed her fingers from her ears. “We’ve got to do something about that doorbell.”

 

            “Great-Aunt Viola’s always been very good at Permanent Sticking Charms,” Sarah said. “I’m not sure we can. Anyway, you go and let Stephen and Ryan in, I’ll tidy.”

 

            “Aha,” Abby said. “No. You go and get Stephen and Ryan, and that way the flat will actually be tidier when you get back.”

 

            Sarah grinned and left, slamming the door behind her. Abby engaged in a whirlwind tidy-up, so that by the time Stephen and Ryan arrived in Sarah’s wake, the place looked a bit neater and all of Sarah’s journals, notes and books were in the study, rather than strewn around the living-room, the kitchen, and the top of the cistern in the bathroom.

 

            Stephen, Ryan and Sarah were laden down with cartons of delicious-smelling food, and Abby sniffed the air and hummed with involuntary appreciation. “God, the Leaky Cauldron’s got a lot better since Hannah Abbott started cooking there.”

 

            “Tom’s profits have shot up, apparently,” Stephen volunteered.

 

            “Didn’t know you drank in there,” Ryan said. “Where do you want these?”

 

            “Stick them in the kitchen, we can get plates from there,” Abby suggested.

 

            “I used to,” Stephen said, carrying his boxes through. “Before I started using my wand again, I used to… get a drink in the Cauldron sometimes, just to test the waters, you know?”

           

            “Yeah,” Abby said, and gave him a half-smile which Ryan politely ignored. Ryan’s own relationship with the wizarding world was a lot simpler than Abby’s or Stephen’s, for the very simple reason that he’d never worked for a wizarding institution before his near-death experience in the Permian had caused him to leave the Muggle army to recuperate in St Mungo’s, and then join the Aurors. He’d spent most of the 1990s in various places where Voldemort was not as big a concern as the people shooting at you, and where the Daily Prophet sold even fewer papers than usual.

 

            Sarah, who was unusually good at empathy for an academic, coughed and whipped four plates, several trays and a marching band of cutlery out of the drawers and cupboards with a wave of her wand. They settled with a clatter on the kitchen table. “Right, who wants what? We can picnic in the living room, it’s nicer than the dining room.”

 

            Ryan caught Abby’s eye. _Dining room?_ his expression said.

 

            Abby tried to convey the concept that after hearing a little of Sarah’s family history she was just glad that there wasn’t a ballroom in the flat, with nothing more than eyebrows and creative staring. It probably didn’t work, but Ryan shrugged and went back to prising open the paper cartons, breaking the seals (suspiciously Muggle stickers with _Leaky Cauldron by Hannah Abbott_ written around a friendly green and yellow bubbling stewpot).

 

            “Nice flat,” Ryan said.

 

            “It’s not bad,” Sarah said judiciously, dismissing at a stroke the rooms that were suspiciously too big and roomy for the building’s fabric, the softly carpeted floors, delicately painted walls and built-in fittings, the panelling in the study, two bathrooms, three bedrooms, solid wards, the hieroglyphic spell of protection and sweet dreams painted around the walls of Sarah’s room, the endless bookshelves and well-appointed kitchen, and, for the love of Merlin, the _broom rack_. Sarah didn’t even fly unless it was on a carpet, but she had a broom rack.

 

            Abby got sort of homesick for her own flat, sometimes. The big windows, exposed brick and punching bag, the mezzanine floor, the space for her lizards, even Connor and his regular outbreaks of twerp-ness. She’d got it for so little because nobody wanted it, too hard to heat and in a dodgy area, but Abby wasn’t scared of dodgy areas and she could manage a heating charm as well as anybody; Connor, bless him, had never noticed that the heating bill was much lower than it should have been. She said nothing, but tore the seal on the last carton of food, and the aroma of roast beef rose enticingly into the air.

 

            Stephen’s stomach rumbled, and Abby and Sarah laughed at him.

 

            “I’m a growing boy, I need feeding,” Stephen said, pretending not to be embarrassed, but there was a flush high on his chiselled cheekbones.

 

            “Got to keep up your strength,” Ryan said blandly.

 

            There was a long pause in which Sarah and Abby blinked at each other and tried not to giggle aloud.

 

            “For dinosaur-chasing,” Ryan added, almost absently. Sarah was invalided out in a silent fit of the giggles, rushing off to her own room with some garbled excuse, and Stephen stared after her with a look that indicated betrayal before wandering over to the other side of the kitchen to make a fuss of Darwin the owl.

 

            “Why did you call your owl Darwin?” Abby enquired, changing the subject.

 

            “It was that or Linnaeus,” Stephen said, “and I wrote too many essays on taxonomy as a concept to go for Linnaeus. And it would have been a bit pretentious.”

 

            “My flatmate named her owl Re-Harakhte,” Abby said. “I don’t think pretentious is a thing you need to worry about, with owls. I mean, can you imagine an owl called, I don’t know, Spot?”

 

            “My owl at Hogwarts was called Wol,” Ryan volunteered.

 

            Stephen stared at him. “Wol?”

 

            “Didn’t you have Winnie the Pooh at home?” Abby asked, entertained. More established wizarding families often stuck to old stories like Beedle the Bard, or whatever was new at Flourish and Blott’s, but in families where there was a significant Muggleborn, Squib or just plain Muggle contingent, the kids often got Babbitty Rabbitty alongside _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_.

 

            Stephen shook his head. “My parents might have tried. I wasn’t big on reading as a kid. I wanted to play Quidditch and climb trees and bring bugs home.”

 

            “If you don’t like reading, how come you ended up in academia?” Ryan asked.

 

            “I like it now,” Stephen said, more uneasily, and hesitated a bit before speaking again; Abby thought he wouldn’t have spoken at all if Ryan hadn’t been there. “My mum gave me _My Family and Other Animals_ for my birthday one year and changed my mind.”  

 

            Sarah re-emerged. “What are we talking about? Food?”

 

            “Books,” Abby said, reminded that there was, in fact, food, and started scooping some onto her plate. Stephen and Ryan had evidently ordered a bit of whatever Hannah had plenty of: lamb curry, mounds of basmati rice, vegetable risotto, a slice of fish pie, delicately pink-tinged roast beef drowning in gravy, Yorkshire pudding to go with it, carrots and broccoli and French peas with little bits of onion in. There wasn’t more than one serving of any one thing, except the carrots and the rice, but there was certainly enough for them all to feed themselves generously.

 

            “Ooh!”

 

            “Families,” Abby added.

 

            “Morgana’s tits,” Sarah said again, face falling, and she dolloped a large spoonful of creamy risotto on her plate as if to make up for the topic. “Do we have to?”

           

            “No,” Stephen said, leaping on a change in topic. “Ryan, can you pass me a plate? Sarah, do you mind if I get some water?”

 

***

             

            A beautiful woman dropped into the empty seat at Becker’s café table. “Is this seat taken?” she said with a practised flirtatious smile, leaning forward over the table and giving Becker an excellent view of her cleavage.

 

            “Um,” Becker said, coffee halfway to his mouth, lowered his newspaper, and shoved his

foot firmly into his mouth. “I’m gay.”

 

            “I know,” the woman smiled, tucking black curly hair behind her ears. Dangly pink earrings chimed quietly as she brushed them; they matched the shade of her blush-coloured chiffon top perfectly. (Becker decided he had spent too much time listening to Jenny Lewis’s remarks on clothing as a signifier of status, intentions and threat level.) “I don’t want to fuck you, I just want everyone in this café to think that’s what I want. _Muffliato_.”

 

            “I’m sorry?” Becker said, assessing his surroundings for weapons.

 

            “Your name is Hilary Becker, you’re twenty-six years old, and you’re a Squib. You also work for the anomaly project.” The woman settled into her chair and appropriated Becker’s coffee. “Thank you so much.”

 

            Becker waited for her to discover that he’d put a tooth-rotting amount of sugar in the coffee, and was disappointed that her pretty face didn’t even flicker at the taste. “So… you’re a witch.”

 

            “Yes.” The woman took a healthy gulp of his coffee. “I hope that doesn’t bother you. Thanks to Oliver Leek, the anomaly project isn’t a shared Muggle/wizarding enterprise any more, so I haven’t a Muggle colleague I could pass you to.”

 

            “Wizards don’t bother me,” Becker assured her. “Unless they’re being wankers.”

 

            “I’ll do my best,” the woman promised.

 

            Becker leaned back in his chair, wondering if he could grab the empty chair nearest to him, whack the woman about the head and escape before she got off a curse or anyone called the police. “So. Who are you, who do you work for, what do you want and why are you bothering me on a Saturday morning?”

 

            “Charmingly direct, aren’t you?” the woman praised, setting his coffee down.

 

             “I’m not a pet,” Becker said, a little sharply. Fuck, he hated patronising wizards and witches. It made him want to start talking evisceration and the finer points of various automatic weapons over the dinner table.

 

            “No,” the woman said. “I know that.”

 

            Becker folded his arms and fixed her with his best flat stare. Being a colleague of Danny Quinn’s had given it a proper workout, so it was far more potent than it had been six months ago.

 

            “I work for James Lester at the Ministry of Magic,” the woman said. “My name is Caroline Steel.”

 

            Becker suppressed a sharp intake of breath and felt himself go rigid in his chair. He was fairly well up on the events that had led to Leek’s insurrection, although the magical element had escaped him – he had never known Lester was a wizard, and immediately started wondering who else had been on the anomaly project that was magical – and he spent enough time with Connor to hear the blank space called Caroline in his conversations. It was a smaller blank space than the one called Abby, but it was still present. “I know who you are. You’ve got a fucking cheek, Miss Steel.”

 

            Caroline Steel pulled a Terry’s Chocolate Orange from her handbag and set it on the table. “Touch it with your right index finger.”

 

            Faced with a witch who seemed bent on ordering him around like he was some kind of semi-skilled, second-class lackey, Becker fought to keep his temper. “If this is a Portkey and I get dragged off to the Ministry, I will start hurting people,” he warned.

 

            “It’s not. It’s my bona fides.” Caroline Steel smiled thinly. “I told Lester I’d need something to prove I wasn’t here to hurt you.”

 

              Becker touched the chocolate. It glowed orange for one disconcerting moment, and then it started to talk. Becker very carefully did not jump, and recognised the sharp-edged, drawling voice of the man in a beautifully tailored suit he’d made casual conversation with at some kind of Whitehall do, eighteen months ago. He hadn’t been very surprised to hear from Major Preston that James Lester had been peripherally involved in his secondment to the anomaly project; Lester’s blue eyes had had the look of a man who was planning something. What he had been surprised to find was Lester absent from the project, his replacement a relatively inexperienced civil servant.

 

            “Becker,” said the chocolate in James Lester’s voice. “You’re hearing from me because you are speaking to Caroline Steel, and she has been unable to win your trust. Inept, Miss Steel. During her entanglement with the anomaly project in 2007, Miss Steel was an active Unspeakable, a wizarding spy. She involved herself in Leek’s plot at my instigation and was instrumental in uncovering it. She now works for me on the wizarding anomaly project, fulfilling a role similar to that performed by Jenny Lewis during my tenure at the ARC.”

 

            The chocolate glowed orange again and fell silent. Becker opened his mouth, considered the several things he could say and oughtn’t say, and finally resorted to: “I hope nobody else saw that glowing.”

 

            “Muffliato isn’t the only spell I cast,” Caroline Steel said. She sounded a little more relaxed.  “Are you happy now?”

 

            “No, but I’m not going to cave your skull in with the nearest chair.”

 

            Caroline eyed him, and then gave an unexpected half-moon curve of genuine amusement. “That’ll do. To recap, I’m Caroline Steel, I work for James Lester, and your other two questions were what do I want and why am I bothering you on a Saturday morning. Isn’t that right?”

 

            Becker nodded.

 

            “To take the second first,” Caroline said, “you’re a difficult man to get hold of. I could hardly Apparate into the middle of your team and Apparate out again with you. The Obliviators would not be happy bunnies, Lester would fire me, and Captain Ryan would have a serious sense of humour failure.”

 

            Becker, who had returned to his now lukewarm coffee, snorted coffee out of his nose. “Ryan?” To the best of Becker’s knowledge and belief, his sainted predecessor rested in an immaculately-kept grave somewhere in Wiltshire.

 

            “He isn’t dead,” Caroline said. “St Mungo’s really earned their keep there. But he wouldn’t have survived if he was a Muggle, so he had to disappear. He’s an Auror, now. I’m led to understand that the learning curve has been very steep.”

 

            “For him?”

 

            “For the Aurors,” Caroline said dryly.

 

            Becker mopped up the coffee and shook his head. “Next thing you’ll be telling me Stephen Hart isn’t dead either.”

 

            Caroline was pointedly silent.

 

            “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Becker said, throwing the dampened napkin down. “And Abby Maitland?”

 

            “Nobody ever said Abby Maitland was dead,” Caroline pointed out.

 

            “So you people shredded the anomaly project for nothing?” Becker demanded, genuinely angry. He knew the ARC well enough now to see the cracks that had formed in the absence of Abby Maitland, of Stephen Hart; he knew Cutter’s sadness and Connor’s distress, and those cracks were healing over, but they weren’t gone yet. For fuck’s sake, fucking wizards, always sticking their noses in where they weren’t fucking wanted.

 

            Caroline interrupted Becker’s x-rated internal monologue. “Not nothing.” She nibbled daintily at a crust of toast Becker hadn’t bothered with. “James Lester originally set up the anomaly project with a mixed staff, believing that the anomalies were a phenomenon that was neither strictly Muggle nor strictly magical, in the face of more political opposition than you or I knows about. He’s made his career in Muggle/Magical liaison work, and he believes that the fall of the Statute of Secrecy will happen in his lifetime.”

 

            “Men like James Lester don’t have ideals,” Becker said.

 

            Caroline ignored this. “He had to bow to pressure and split the project in two after the Leek thing. Leek was getting too close to magic – he had an inkling – and can you imagine what he would have done with witches and wizards?”

 

            Becker, who had read the files on Oliver Leek, could guess what the man’s power complex and nasty little mind would have done with magic. He reluctantly chalked up a point to Lester and Steel.

 

            Caroline shook her head impatiently. “Lester made the separation as neat as possible. He didn’t have a lot of options. I… respect him for what he did, I suppose.”

 

            “And now you work for him,” Becker said.

 

            “And now I work for him,” Caroline agreed.

 

            “You, and Stephen, and Abby, and Captain Ryan.”

 

            “Yes,” Caroline said.

 

            “Christ,” Becker said, and rubbed his hands over his face.

 

            “It’s a lot to take in,” Caroline said.

 

            “Don’t patronise me,” Becker said through his hands. “Let’s have the rest. Out with it. What’s the problem?”  


            “The problem is that you need to keep Cutter and Temple on a tighter leash,” Caroline said.

 

            Becker couldn’t stop his hollow laugh. “Have you met them?”

 

            “Obviously,” Caroline said. “But we’ve Confounded Cutter four times in the last year because he keeps getting ahead of you and seeing things he ought not to.”

 

            Becker folded his arms again, sat back in his chair, and rocked back on it, one foot resting on the table’s support. “And I suppose this explains why Connor keeps seeing Stephen Hart’s ghost?”

 

            Caroline nodded. “Stephen’s not doing it on purpose.”

 

            “But he isn’t trying not to, either, is he?” Becker said, grammar terrible and voice full of resignation. Of course. He’d never met Stephen Hart, but it stood to reason that he would be a stubborn bastard, just like all his former colleagues.

 

            Caroline sighed, and for the first time, she looked human, instead of like some ineffable, secretive siren. “No. He isn’t. He misses him.”

 

            “It’s mutual,” Becker said, for lack of anything else to say, but it was perfectly true. Connor sometimes behaved as if he thought he was going to turn around and find Stephen leaning against a worktop nearby, half-lidded blue eyes bright with laughter, a smirk on his handsome face; and then, all too obviously, Connor would remember that Stephen was gone, and the light would go from his face. But Becker thought that lately, Connor had been happier to talk about Stephen in the past tense, to enjoy the memories rather than feel the bitterness they’d left behind.

 

            Christ, Becker definitely spent too much time with Connor, but – he worked with the man, and Connor had many weaknesses, but a failure to endear himself to those around him wasn’t among them. Even Abby Maitland had evidently been fond of him, and the snippets Connor had let drop – embarrassed, shy – about his early dealings with her made Becker wonder why Miss Maitland hadn’t kneed him in the balls and walked away from the anomalies with her pet flying lizard. The pet flying lizard that now lived with Connor, and which Connor kept bringing to work. Becker was almost getting used to the little sod.

 

            “I think he… accepts it,” Becker added awkwardly.

 

            “Who?”

 

            “Connor.” Becker stared at the table’s chipped plastic coating. “He accepts Stephen’s gone.”

 

            “Well, that’s one up on Stephen,” Caroline muttered.

 

            Becker raised his eyebrows at her.

 

            “If you think your anomaly project is bad,” Caroline said, “just imagine everyone who works with you has a wand, most of them are veterans of the Second Wizarding War, and they all think they can protect themselves. Herding cats isn’t in it. Except for Sarah, bless her,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “Sarah just gets carried away with the work.”

 

            Becker assessed this, and decided not to enquire further. “It could be worse. You could have Cutter and Quinn to deal with.”

 

            Caroline paused, pursed her lips, and then shuddered. “No, you’re right, it could be worse. Thank you for reminding me.” She put the Terry’s Chocolate Orange languishing on the table between them back into her handbag and slung it over her shoulder. “I’d better go. Things to do, you know?”

 

            “Yeah.” Becker, whose Muggle foster parents had brought him up to be polite to ladies of all descriptions including magical spies who enchanted chocolate, stood when she stood. “Have a good weekend. I’ll try and keep the Scooby team on a leash.”

 

            “Scooby team?”  


            “Muggle TV show,” Becker said. “Watch it. Connor’s Daphne in this scenario.”

 

            “I’ll have a look,” Caroline said, not sounding terribly sincere. “Thanks for the recommendation.” She gave Becker another flirtatious smile and a lingering kiss on the cheek, although if you asked Becker the illusion of a flirtation had been ruined by their body language at least half an hour ago. Maybe the spell had fixed that, too. She was wearing perfume, something light and floral, and Becker had the sudden, disconcerting thought that she was wearing it because that was what a lovely woman dressed in floaty pink would wear, rather than because she actually liked it; he made a mental note to stop overthinking, and carefully detached her hand from where it was curled into his jumper.

 

            “Good luck,” Caroline murmured against his cheek, and then she walked away, putting a little extra sashay into it.

 

            “Get in, mate,” said a bloke at the next table.

 

            Becker managed a weak smile, and collapsed into his chair. “Yeah, maybe.” 


	4. Chapter 4

            “It’s a shuvuuia!” Connor said, sounding delighted.

 

            “Bless you,” Danny said, nursing a sprained wrist. For once, he didn’t sound boisterously up for the challenge of yet another anomaly, and Jenny bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself smirking. Danny’s exuberance had been his downfall on this occasion; diving for a… shuvuuia?... he’d tripped over one of Kew Gardens’ ornamental rock displays and landed badly in a spiky bush. Lieutenant Owen had immediately seized on him, and was now cleaning his various cuts while the team stood in the middle of the greenhouse, sweating buckets, and tried to work out what to do with the shuvuuias.

 

            Kew Gardens was beautiful but almost deserted, in keeping with the cold, gloomy December weather. Just about the only bit of it that hadn’t been as quiet as the grave was the greenhouse they were standing in, and that was chiefly because there were a bunch of small chittering dinosaurs running around it, and small chittering schoolchildren running after them. Their parents were less impressed with the little mottled beasties, and once all the children had been tracked down it was easy enough to persuade them to leave. Jenny had told them it was a practical joke initiated by some postgraduate zoology and botany students slightly associated with Kew, and they’d been happy enough to accept that, except for the one parent who had wanted to know what they were.

 

            “I don’t know,” Jenny had told him, “I brought experts to tell me that,” and he had laughed and said ‘Good move!’ and walked away telling his kids that there would be no hot chocolate if they didn’t stop complaining about not being able to play with the lizards. Jenny didn’t think he would be a problem.

 

            “Shuvuuias,” Cutter said, in a contemplative sort of tone. “Makes sense.” He looked up and around the greenhouse at the lush vegetation, and tugged at the collar of his coat. It was far hotter in the greenhouse than it was outside. “Cretaceous. All this probably reminds them of home.”

 

            “Cretaceous,” Becker said in a resigned tone of voice, shifting his grip on his rifle. He had been unusually twitchy at the beginning of the shout, staring suspiciously around as if he were looking for something or someone, but Jenny was pleased to see that he’d calmed down.  “Great. All the large things with lots of teeth.”

 

            “Not all of them, Captain,” Cutter said. “Most of them.”

 

            Lieutenant Owen and Becker rolled their eyes at each other in perfect stereo, and Danny grinned in a way that suggested he was thinking of something new and foolhardy to do. Jenny decided to take control before events got out of hand.

 

            “Connor, tell us about them. Any ideas what they eat, or anything that might help us trap them?”

 

            “They’re small,” Connor said, stating the bloody obvious, and then they all froze as one as a Shuvuuia stuck its snout out of the vegetation.

 

            “Drop it, Finn,” Becker snapped, and a tranquiliser dart whizzed through the air just as the Shuvuuia let out a tiny squeak and disappeared. There was a thud and a rustle, and the bush it had disappeared into shook violently for half a second.

 

            “Got the little bastard,” Finn said cheerily. “Sorry, Miss Lewis.”

 

            Jenny just sighed, and Cutter went over and reached into the bushes, retrieving the little thing. It was about three feet long, and only about a foot high; mottled dark green and olive and lightly built, it was almost invisible in the greenery. They were also bloody fast, as Danny had discovered.

 

            “We think they ate insects,” Connor said. “And worms.” He closed his laptop and put it away, eyeing the Shuvuuia rather sadly. “Sorry, I don’t know much about animals. I mean, practically. You want Abby, really.”

 

            “Well, she’s not here,” Jenny said briskly. “For which thank God –” Cutter and Connor both looked at her as if she’d betrayed them – “because I have to say, Nick, Abby would have castrated you for picking that dinosaur up by one foot.”

 

            Connor went bright red and tried not to laugh; Nick’s eyes crinkled at the corners and his mouth tilted in a half grin. “Aye, that would have been a nuisance. So.” He straightened up and ran a hand through his hair, making it stick right up. “We have three problems. We don’t know where the anomaly is, we don’t know how many creatures have come through, and we don’t know if they’ve got out. Danny, can you find the anomaly?”

 

            Danny brightened up slightly.

 

            “Go with him, Finn,” Becker said. “Shoot anything that looks at you funny.”

 

            “Tranquilisers,” Cutter said sternly.

 

            “With tranquilisers,” Becker added, a note of reluctance in his voice.

 

            Connor chuckled unexpectedly. “Somewhere, Abby just snapped a biro with rage and she doesn’t even know why.” He patted his laptop bag. “I’ll go and have a look outside, see if there are any holes in the greenhouse.”

 

            Becker nodded at Adey, who followed Connor out of the greenhouse, and then Cutter and Jenny and Becker were looking at each other.

 

            “I’ll go and join the police at the perimeter,” Jenny said. “Call me if anything changes.”

 

            Cutter nodded, then looked at Becker and jerked his head towards one of the greenhouse’s paths. “Let’s see if we can find some shuvuuia, lad.”

 

            “I’ll find you dinosaurs if you’ll think of something else to call them, Professor,” Becker said, and Jenny bit her tongue on a giggle as she turned and walked away. She only realised when she’d got to the greenhouse entrance that Lieutenant Owen had fallen into step behind her.

 

            “Shouldn’t you be helping Captain Becker and the professor?” Jenny enquired. She lifted her feet carefully as they cut across a grassy corner and pushed her weight onto the balls of her feet; her heels were sinking into the soft ground.

 

            “Captain Becker has strong feelings about civilian team members wandering off, ma’am,” said Lieutenant Owen.

 

            “He’s been putting up with his feelings for the last year,” Jenny pointed out. None of the anomaly team was especially biddable, with the possible exception of Connor, who had a sweeter nature than the rest of them. Danny in particular was prone to wandering off and committing feats of unbelievably stupid heroism that made Becker turn red with suppressed fury, but Cutter was also happy to take off on his own, and Jenny herself wasn’t going to hang around waiting for a bodyguard if she needed to go and talk to someone. The press were a good deal less likely to eat her than Captain Becker seemed to think.

 

            “Apparently they got stronger over the weekend,” Lieutenant Owen said blandly.

 

            Jenny came to an abrupt halt, and he stopped with her. “ _Ditzy_.”

 

            “Yes, ma’am?” The soldier’s tone did not change, regardless of the fact that she’d used his nickname and put all the menace she could reasonably summon into her voice. They’d probably all got too used to her. Jenny cursed herself, and decided to find a way to put the fear of Jennifer Lewis into a few more project members.

 

            “If something’s going on and you’re keeping important information from me, I will make your life really _very_ diff-”

 

            There was a noise like a car backfiring or a gunshot, and Jenny found herself on the ground with Lieutenant Owen half on top of her, barking into his radio. A spark of pure fear shot down her spine, and she consciously calmed her breathing. Lieutenant Owen got up and let her sit up, and Jenny saw various men in black and the police appearing at speed.

 

            “What,” Jenny said deliberately, brushing mud off her skirt, “was _that_?”

 

            “I have no fucking idea,” Owen said tightly. “Not right for a gunshot, but –” He nodded at some of the approaching figures and broke off to talk to them. Hordes of people descended on the area where the noise had come from, and Jenny attempted to stand up. Lieutenant Owen put his hand on her head and pushed her firmly back down again, and Jenny swallowed her furious reaction and counted quietly to ten. She was accustomed to the soldiers physically shielding them or pushing them out of the way, and accepted it as a necessity, but this was just humiliating.

 

            “Lieutenant?” she said sweetly, at the end of this countdown.

 

            “Yes, ma’am?” he said, brown eyes gone sharp and hard. He was talking into his radio in between talking to her, seeking orders from Becker.

 

            “If you do that again, _I will make your life hell_. Do I make myself clear? If you want me to stay down, say so, don’t push me down like a _doll_.”

 

            Lieutenant Owen glanced down at her. He almost looked penitent, which would have to do for the moment. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

 

            Jenny glared up at him. “You’d better be. May I get up?”

 

            “Yes.” Lieutenant Owen offered her a conciliatory hand up, which Jenny accepted. “There aren’t any holes in the greenhouse and the anomaly’s a small, weak one, so nothing much is likely to come through it.”

 

            “Bite your tongue,” Jenny said, dusting herself off. “If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard someone say that it will probably be all right… anyway. I assume we’re clearing the area until the police have… also cleared the area, in a different sense?”

 

            Lieutenant Owen nodded, and Jenny followed him out to the perimeter. The others joined them after a few moments, looking a little on edge, and they waited for ten minutes or so before the police came back saying that there was no one in the grounds that they could see, but they would like to check the greenhouse that had been left locked.

 

            Jenny, itching for something to work out her frustrations on, leapt on them like a starving lion on a wildebeest and proceeded to deal with all their objections in a fashion that had Nick Cutter grinning quietly in a corner, Danny Quinn mumbling something to him about ‘rather you than me, mate’, and Connor Temple coming down with a bad case of hero-worship – at least, if the look on his face was any guide. The policemen all but staggered away, and Jenny folded her lips and suggested that her team return to the greenhouse.

 

            They went. Lieutenant Owen stayed.

 

            “I don’t suppose,” Jenny said, typing an answer to Claudia’s texted query ( _Shots fired at Kew Gardens. Anything to do with you? Please be more discreet_ ), “that in light of what just happened, you’d like to revise your earlier remarks? Which suggested, but –” she lowered her Blackberry and glared – “didn’t actually say that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on.”

 

            Lieutenant Owen rested his hand on the butt of the handgun attached to one thigh, shifted his weight, and stared into the middle distance, face fixed in an expression that suggested deep thought. The wind twisted and blew cold air down the back of Jenny’s neck, and standing this close to Lieutenant Owen, she could hear his radio crackling faintly. The anomaly affected the signal badly, but Jenny could just about hear Becker giving orders, Cutter giving orders that very nearly but not quite contradicted Becker’s, and the familiar sounds of Connor yelping and falling over things. Additional crashing noises could simply have been white noise, but Jenny thought it likely that at least fifty percent of them were Danny, doing God alone knew what.

 

            “Don’t hurt yourself,” Jenny said.

 

            “Excuse me, ma’am?”

 

            “Thinking,” Jenny said, drier than the Sahara. “It looks painful.”

 

            Lieutenant Owen grinned. “No, ma’am. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t anything special going on. But that’s not the first time I’ve heard a noise like that at an anomaly.”

 

            “Really,” Jenny said, sending her text. ( _No. Not shots and not us, either_.)

 

            Owen nodded. “It’s always been when there was a reason for a similar noise. Motorcycles around. Guns firing. But it’s definitely not quite the same.”

 

            “How long have you been hearing it at anomalies?” Jenny asked, interested now. “No, wait a moment.” She had spotted a journalist out of the corner of her eye, a brass-faced man with the look of somebody who thought he knew exactly what was in the public interest. Sure enough, he came over to her, and Jenny enjoyed the challenge of sharpening her claws on him without drawing metaphorical blood. After ten minutes of sustained wordplay, he went away unsatisfied, and Jenny went back to Lieutenant Owen.

 

            “You were saying,” she said.

 

            “I’ve always heard it around anomalies,” he told her. “And the others say so, too.”

 

            Jenny tapped her fingers against the plastic case of her phone, thinking. “And what else do they say?”

 

            “Lots of things, ma’am, probably most of them not fit for a lady’s ears.”

 

            “And now you’re mocking me, Ditzy, thank you very much.” Jenny sighed. “What else have you seen or heard that’s strange?”

 

            There was a sudden, awkward silence. Jenny folded her arms and glared at Lieutenant Owen, causing an admiring policewoman to decide to practise that facial expression in the mirror for future use. “Out with it,” she said.

 

            “Temple isn’t the only one who thinks he’s seen Hart,” Lieutenant Owen said, very reluctantly indeed.

 

            Jenny stared at him, dropping her arms. “I absolutely refuse to believe that ghosts are involved in the anomaly project. Stephen Hart is dead.”

 

            “I know that, ma’am,” Lieutenant Owen said, looking as sheepish as humanly possible.

 

            “We’re all catching hysteria from Connor,” Jenny said, with an air of finality. “Everyone except me, Claudia, and Miss Wickes. Which is ironic. Never mind. What else?”

 

            “Nothing else,” Lieutenant Owen said. Jenny thought he was probably telling the truth.

 

            Somebody, almost certainly Danny, uttered a loud hunting cry, and a shuvuuia streaked past them and disappeared into some bushes. So inured was Jenny to the sudden appearance of dinosaurs small and large that she barely even twitched. Lieutenant Owen’s hand went to the butt of his pistol, which Jenny took to be the soldierly equivalent of barely even twitching.

 

            “What was that?” squawked an inconveniently attentive policeman, hand going to his baton.

 

            “What was what?” Jenny demanded, selecting the simplest of all cover stories and feeling a little like the penguin in _Madagascar_ , intoning ‘You didn’t see anything,’ and making mystical gestures with its flippers. Some days she was not sure team movie nights were a good idea, whatever their bonding properties.

 

            “I saw something! I’m sure I saw something!”

 

            “Mate, you’re seeing things,” Lieutenant Owen said, falling blessedly into line.

 

            Connor Temple and Danny Quinn shot across the lawn in hot pursuit of the shuvuuia.

 

            The policeman gave both Jenny and Lieutenant Owen a sceptical look. “Are they also seeing things?”

 

            “Probably,” Jenny said, glaring. “And I suggest you turn around and start seeing something else, constable.”

 

***

            In the echoes of the Apparition crack, half the anomaly team turned on the unfortunate Auror responsible and began to rebuke him. Stephen, who always felt slightly sick when Apparating, retired to the edge of the clearing in Epping Forest they had gone to, and tried to quell his roiling stomach. He had only got the hang of Apparating after leaving Hogwarts and starting work, since travel around the Romanian dragon reserve entailed the use of a broom or Apparition, and in winter it was too bloody cold to spend any appreciable amount of time in the air. But his placement had ended after a year, and he’d quietly slipped into a Muggle life almost immediately afterwards; Apparating had been totally off-limits.

 

            He was still bad at it. He rubbed the spot on the back of his hand where a thin slice of skin had been left behind in the world’s most minor splinching, and wondered if Connor would spot it. Unlikely, in the circumstances. He sat down on the stump of a tree trunk, and watched the Auror trainee get his arse handed to him. The poor lad was twenty-one if he was a day, and looked painfully young – and also as if he might piss himself, with Caroline Steel in his face spitting fire, Ryan looming over him, and his NCOs lurking in the background.

 

            “You idiot!” Caroline Steel was saying furiously. “What part of ‘quiet and discreet’ did you somehow miss? There is nothing about _Apparating without a silencing charm_ around a pack of Muggles that’s _quiet and discreet_!”

           

            “I thought the silencing charm had worked, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. Sir.” The trainee’s eyes darted back and forth between Ryan and Caroline, as if trying to decide which one he was more afraid of.

 

            Caroline, Stephen thought. Definitely Caroline.

 

            Richards, one of the NCOs, drew a knife from a sheath with a wholly unnecessary and probably manufactured scraping sound, and started to clean his nails with it. Stephen rolled his eyes, and the trainee quailed.

           

            “I leave him up to you, Captain Ryan,” Caroline said eventually, icicles dangling from her every word. “But let me make this clear, MacKinnon, you fuck up like that again and I will _personally_ string your entrails from the fountain in the Atrium, do you understand me? We can’t afford to get this wrong.”

 

            “Yes, ma’am,” MacKinnon said, eyes now fixed on Ryan, who looked thoroughly merciless. And very handsome, but that probably wasn’t supposed to occur to Stephen right now.

 

            Ryan nodded at Caroline, then turned those ruthless grey eyes on MacKinnon for what must have been a soul-destroying minute, before looking at Reilly and Richards, standing behind MacKinnon. Reilly’s face split in a singularly evil smile, distorting the scars she’d received from Fenrir Greyback during the War, and she nodded at Ryan. Richards flipped his knife over and over, then settled it back into his sheath.

 

            “Come on, Stephen,” Caroline said, and Stephen jerked and suddenly realised that she’d stamped over to him in her silver Doc Martens and was now steaming past him. He got up and followed her hastily, as they wound through the chilly, thinned-out forest. This part was Unplottable and heavily warded; not only Muggles, but also wizards and witches who didn’t work for the Ministry, would find it impossible to get here. It was used as a sort of staging post between the Ministry and other parts of the country, as it was neither safe nor sensible for large numbers of people to Apparate into central London on a regular basis.

 

            Stephen followed Caroline to a heavily pollarded tree, gnarly with age, slipping and sliding on the sludgy brown leaves underfoot, and once threatening to fall into a small cold brook that ran through the staging post. Single drops of rain fell from lackadaisical clouds, and the back of Stephen’s hand stung. He slid, and a hand grabbed his elbow and hoisted him up; Stephen glanced back, and there was Ryan, followed by his Aurors, including a very chastised-looking MacKinnon and a Reilly whose expression suggested she was thinking up new and hideous variants on a punishment run for MacKinnon. Stephen found a small smile for Ryan, and regained his footing.

 

            Stephen looked ahead again, and wondered how it was that Caroline never faltered or slipped. Unlike Ryan, wearing Auror’s combat fatigues, or Stephen, dressed in practical outdoor clothes with streaks of mud derived from trying to catch a stray shuvuuia and stay out of sight of the anomaly team, she was dressed for the morning’s meeting in tailored pin-striped navy blue, slim-fit trousers and fitted waistcoat, crisp white shirt and violet cravat tucked into its neck, and a heavy, wizard-style outer robe in navy blue over the top that would have been old-fashioned if it weren’t for the fact that it barely covered her hips.

 

            “Do you think she’s competing with Lester?” Stephen muttered to Ryan as Caroline set her palm on the bark of the pollarded tree and vanished.

 

            “What for?”

 

            “Most immaculate dress sense,” Stephen said, set his own palm to the tree, and swallowed through the feeling of airlessness that these doors always engendered. When he reached the other side, he felt Ryan’s fingers wrap around his wrist, and had to swallow around a completely different feeling of airlessness.

 

            Ryan was frowning at his hand. “You’re bleeding.”

 

            “I splinched myself a bit,” Stephen admitted, staring at Ryan’s fingers. He felt rooted to the spot. “It’s nothing.”

 

            Ryan raised his eyebrows at him, and then there was a pile-up as the rest of the Aurors came through and crashed into Ryan’s back; Ryan moved sideways, Stephen’s wrist still in his grip. Caroline was standing at the exit to the Apparating station, tapping one foot impatiently.

 

            Stephen moved forward, and Ryan dropped his wrist and fell into step beside him. The Aurors sorted themselves out in a tangle of wands and cursing, and Stephen tried to ignore the stinging of his hand or the memory of Ryan’s fingers curled around him.

 

            “I’ve got some dittany in my office,” Ryan offered. “Better than leaving it to Rees to flap at you with bandages.”

 

            Stephen nodded. “I should get back and write up today, but…”

 

            “You can’t write with your hand bleeding,” Caroline said, choosing this moment to tune in to what they were saying. “Take the nice captain up on his offer, there’s a good Hart.” They reached the end of the corridor, where you had a choice of going right, left or straight into a lift, and Caroline muttered a cantrip; the lift grate, which had been about to close, creaked open again to admit her.

 

            Ryan looked at Stephen.  “Lester basically hired a younger, female version of himself, didn’t he?”

 

            Stephen shrugged, and they turned right and headed for Ryan’s office. The anomaly team’s core members were mostly squashed into a corner of the Aurors’ Headquarters. Caroline and Sarah were wedged into one office, Abby and Stephen had a second, and Ryan shared one with Lyle, who was currently in Anglesey, training. It was a dank, nasty corner of the building, and Lester was perpetually making noises about moving them out of it, though he had a larger, more spacious office on the floor above. Ryan had told Stephen in confidence that the reason Lester had been able to snag it was that it was infested with Dark magic, eight years after the last occupant had vacated it; Lester had gone at it with bleach, water and an impressive array of counter-curses, and after a weekend’s work it had been habitable.  Stephen believed this, because Ryan had told him about it; he was less sure of whether he believed Caroline’s remarks about getting a new headquarters soon, like the building the ARC moved into shortly before Stephen and the other witches and wizards on the project had had to disappear.

 

            Ryan shoved the door to his office open and traded rude remarks with the portrait hung on the back wall. Stephen followed him in, and leant against the edge of one of the flimsy desks, unsure where else to sit or what else to do. Ryan was rummaging through his desk drawers with a great deal of clattering and banging, and Stephen fixed his eyes on the chaos of Lyle’s desk for want of anything else to look at.

 

            “Gotcha,” Ryan said, coming up with a small, stoppered bottle and a box of gauze pads and bandages. “Here, Hart.”

 

            Stephen expected to have the bottle tossed casually to him, but instead, Ryan came over to him and reached for his hand again, pushing the cuff of his coat and shirt back and exposing the scrape fully. It covered most of the back of his hand, pink and raw and oozing faintly. Stephen was dimly aware that he’d been very lucky that it was _only_ a scrape.

 

            “You need practice,” Ryan remarked, one hand supporting Stephen’s while the other shook dittany over the raw patch. The stinging numbed and eased into nonexistence almost immediately, and Stephen bit back a surprised noise. He always forgot how instantaneous most wizarding medicines were.

 

            “Yeah,” he said eventually, unsteadily, and then Ryan unwrapped a clean gauze pad and slapped it on top of the raw patch, before briskly winding a length of bandage around his hand, leaving the thumb free. “Isn’t that overkill?”

 

            “Where we work? God knows what you could get infected with,” Ryan answered, tying a neat knot and stoppering the bottle of dittany. He didn’t move away.

 

            “True,” Stephen said, curiously short of breath; it felt like an elephant was sitting on his ribcage. Strangely, he didn’t mind, although he objected to the suspense. He wasn’t unhappy to have Ryan this far into his personal space, although he didn’t think – he wasn’t _sure_ Ryan was gay, and probably Ryan had no idea that he was, it had taken Stephen a little while to realise it himself, and, and…

 

            “Let me know if you want some practice,” Ryan said, and were his eyes resting on Stephen’s mouth? “I could lend a hand. If you liked.”

 

            “Yeah,” Stephen said, meaning _yes_ to lots of things other than a bit of Apparition practice, and Ryan looked him in the eye and smiled that slow warm smile that had caught Stephen’s eye even when he was stupid in love with Cutter, and then he moved away.

 

            The elephant stepped off Stephen’s ribcage, and Stephen found that he missed the pressure as his lungs inflated fully and he breathed easily. The atmosphere in the room, which had grown tense with something Stephen couldn’t quite name, lightened.

 

            “Heard from Abby?” Ryan asked casually, wrenching at one of the desk drawers.

 

            “Just that she got to Romania fine,” Stephen said. “She texted me to tell Sarah.”

 

            “Sarah hasn’t got a mobile?” Ryan shook his head, either at Sarah or himself. “Right, stupid question. Abby should teach her to use one.”

 

            “Maybe she could swap it for flying carpet tuition,” Stephen hazarded.

 

            Ryan sat down at his desk, and Stephen hesitated for a second, then moved to go. “I’d better – I should get on with writing up.”

 

            “You could bring your reports in here,” Ryan said, reaching for a biro. He didn’t look at Stephen, sandy blond head bent to his desk. “I could do with the company.”

 

            “Won’t Lyle…”

 

            “Gone to Anglesey with the rest of the lads,” Ryan said, pulling a sheet of clean parchment from his desk. “Training. Why does Lester insist on reports on parchment?”

 

            “Like the Ministry will ever digitise,” Stephen said automatically. “Yeah, I could… I could bring my stuff in here. For a bit. Office’s quiet without Abby, anyway.”

 

            Ryan flicked a glance at him, and a brief smile. Stephen went out into the corridor and let the door swing shut behind him. His heart hammered in his chest, a hummingbird the size of his fist, and a half-smile flirted with his lips. 


	5. Chapter 5

            “So I was thinking,” Connor said, shuffling his feet backwards and forwards, and Claudia and Jenny blinked at him. He had stopped by to drop off his latest blueprints for improvements of the ADD and a list of materials he wanted, and Claudia and Jenny had both acknowledged him before going back to thrashing out the finer points of the press policy, but for some reason he was still hanging around.

 

            “Were you?” Claudia said, sounding baffled, and then shook her head and sighed as Connor looked hurt. His hair had grown out again, she noticed, and it was sorely in need of a cut, but at least he had taken to washing it more regularly. Anyway, it was mostly covered by the porkpie hat covered in badges perched on his head. “Sorry, Connor, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. What were you thinking about?”

 

            “We should have a Christmas party,” Connor said, smiling brightly. “For office bonding, like.”

 

            “Oh my God,” Claudia said, “no,” at which point there was a very loud crashing noise from the next room and the sound of Danny Quinn yelping “Don’t shoot, miss!”

 

            Claudia’s head swung round in time with Jenny’s and Connor’s, and they all stared through the glass wall into the PA’s office, where there were a lot of ceiling tiles, dust, and Danny Quinn on the floor. He was lying on his back with his hands raised and a comical look of horror on his face, and Lorraine Wickes was pointing a gun at him. She had very clearly leapt to her feet, knocking her chair back, when Danny had fallen through the ceiling, and she had somehow drawn the gun in her desk drawer fast enough to have it locked on Danny before he could move.

 

            Connor succumbed to a fit of the giggles and turned away, his shoulders shaking. Jenny raised her eyes to heaven, pinched her nose, and collapsed into the ergonomic office chair that Claudia had vacated at the sound of somebody falling through the ceiling. Claudia wondered which of these extremes to go with, and how to show leadership in this difficult situation, given that her PA was an accomplished markswoman with remarkable reflexes and that that gun had no safety catch.          

 

            “Quinn, you little bastard,” said the ceiling in Captain Becker’s voice.

 

            “Bloody hell,” Jenny hissed into the palms covering her face. Connor let out a squeak of hysteria, and Lorraine looked around, wild-eyed, as if trying to work out who to shoot.

 

            Claudia took a deep breath, screwed her courage to the sticking point, suppressed her own hysterics, and stepped forward into the other office. “Lorraine, please put the gun down.”

 

            Lorraine knelt very slowly and set the gun down on the floor. “I’m so sorry, Miss Br-”

 

            “Claudia,” Claudia corrected. “Save your apologies, you’re not at fault. Captain Becker, come down from the ceiling. Preferably without displacing the ceiling tiles any further.”

 

            There was a certain amount of thumping from above – how had she not noticed before? Claudia wondered. Had they been stealthier, or had they just taken a route that didn’t go over her office? – and Captain Becker swung lightly down from the hole in the ceiling, just missing standing on something delicate of Danny’s. By his malicious grin, he knew it, and by Danny’s yelp of indignation, he knew it too. Lorraine’s hand twitched as if it missed the gun. Claudia sympathised.

 

            “Both of you,” Claudia said sharply. “Enough.”

 

            Becker and Danny looked halfway chastised for a moment.

 

            “Danny,” Claudia said, “I want you to explain, in two sentences or fewer, why you were crawling through the ceiling.”

 

            “Only –”

 

            “Yes.”

 

            “Can I get u-”

 

            “No.”

           

            Danny subsided, with a wary look at Lorraine. “Captain Becker and I have been testing the security of the building. I thought the air vents and ceiling would be a good avenue to explore, but that patch has some kind of water damage, and didn’t take my weight.”

 

            Claudia looked at Lorraine.

 

            “Sprinkler leak,” Lorraine said. “Two months ago. Norman fixed it; he said the Archangel Gabriel was to blame.”

 

            Claudia took this reference to the ARC’s eccentric maintenance man and his even more eccentric notions of causation in her stride, and returned her focus to the two miscreants. “Captain Becker. Please explain, in two sentences or fewer, why you were crawling through the ceiling.”

 

            “Because I wanted to prove I could catch Danny before he made a more serious breach of the building’s security,” Captain Becker said, with commendable succinctness.

 

            Claudia digested this. “Well, you’ve both failed,” she said at last. “You –” turning to Danny – “because I think we’ve all realised that, if you really had been one of Helen Cutter’s minions, Miss Wickes would have blown your brains out.” Lorraine looked mortified. Claudia had no time to spare for her scruples after the fact, and was also fairly clear that Lorraine would, in fact, have killed Danny if he’d been one of Helen’s clones or a common-or-garden mercenary. “And you, Becker, have also failed, because Danny evidently achieved a very serious breach of ARC security and you didn’t manage to stop him.”

 

            Becker stared into the middle distance behind her left ear. He thought she didn’t know he was doing it, Claudia knew. “Yes ma’am.”

 

            “Go and stop up whatever hole let him get into the ceiling,” Claudia told him. “If it really is an air vent, don’t stop it up, we need those.”

 

            Becker nodded sharply, and then turned to Lorraine. “Sorry, Miss Wickes.”

 

            Lorraine acknowledged him silently, and he turned on his heel and marched out.

 

            Claudia looked at Danny.

 

            “Please may I get up?” Danny said, evidently making the finest use of manners his poor parents must have gone to considerable trouble to beat into him, thirty-odd years ago.

 

            “You may,” Claudia said. “You may also tidy up this mess and ask Norman to fix the hole in the ceiling, and apologise to Miss Wickes for being such a bloody fool.”

 

            “Sorry, Miss Wickes,” Danny said obediently, prising himself off the floor and dusting off his backside, and then that rakish grin tugged at a corner of his mouth. “I would’ve understood completely if you actually had shot me.”

 

            Lorraine folded her lips and gave him a cold topaz stare. “Apology accepted, Mr Quinn.”

 

            Danny left in a hurry, which was wise, and Lorraine and Claudia were left staring at each other.

 

            “I’m really sorry about that,” Claudia said at last.

 

            “It’s all right,” Lorraine said, and picked up the gun and put it away in the desk drawer she’d pulled it from.

 

            “Is that loaded?” Claudia asked.

 

            “Yes,” Lorraine said.

 

            Claudia sighed. “Of course. What use would it be if it wasn’t? Are you all right?”

 

            “I’m fine,” Lorraine said.

 

            “Mm,” Claudia said. “You remember what I said about the counselling, right, last year.”

 

            “Yes,” Lorraine said, in beautiful crisp Cambridge-educated tones which nonetheless managed to convey a great deal of London-bred ‘fuck off, mate’.

 

            “Well, the New Year’s coming up soon, New Year’s Resolutions and all that, fresh starts,” Claudia said with false breeziness. “Anyway.” She clapped her hands and went back into her office, where her half-sister was still in her chair with her hands over her eyes, and Connor was still shaking with the occasional hiccupping giggle, his eyes streaming with tears of laughter. Claudia forgave him, on the grounds that he needed a laugh.

 

            “Have a tissue,” she said to Connor, and patted Jenny on the shoulder. “What were you saying?”

 

            “Christmas party,” Connor said, wiping his eyes and blowing his nose messily with a tissue from the box off Claudia’s desk. Claudia averted her eyes. “It’ll be fun!”

 

            “Staff Christmas parties are the invention of the devil,” Jenny said darkly, dropping her hands into her lap. Claudia couldn’t help but notice that her immaculate nail-varnish was chipped, and wondered if she ought to try to bully Jenny into counselling too. She would probably be equally unsuccessful, but she owed it to their mother to make the effort.

 

            “They’re not that bad,” Connor wheedled. “We’ll enjoy it. All of us. It would be nice to be together as a team.”

 

            Claudia thought about the holes in her organisation’s carefully patched fabric, the holes in the ceiling, the holes in their budget, the holes in the team’s madcap dynamics, and realised that she would do or say anything if it darned the tears in the anomaly team. “What the hell,” she said.

 

            “You can’t be serious,” Jenny moaned.

 

            “Yes!” Connor cried, punching the air.

 

            Claudia crossed the room and stuck her head back into Lorraine’s office. Lorraine had looked up from her computer and was watching her quizzically.

 

            “Lorraine, when I’m finished with Jenny, will you come through her and have a chat about the petty cash with me?” Claudia asked. “We’re having a Christmas party this year.”

 

            Lorraine’s mouth tilted into a small, real smile, and Claudia’s heart bounced in her chest. It would be worth all the fuss, bother, bad Christmas music and reindeer antlers if she could get more smiles around the place. “Let’s see what we can do,” Lorraine said.

 

***

 

 

            James Lester walked out of his meeting with the Minister with a carefully muted spring in his step, and made his way back to the Aurors’ headquarters with confidence in his every move and his head held high. Of course, he usually did that, but this time, he meant it. He swished past Harry Potter arguing on his mobile phone, cut a swathe through the usual gogglers who collected in Potter’s vicinity whenever he left headquarters, and almost bounced into the lift. He got out a floor early, both because he wanted to give any remaining anomaly team members the glad tidings and because his head was spinning slightly – you could say what you liked about  Downing Street and Tony Blair, and James Lester had said a great deal about both of them, but in his time there he’d got used to lifts that didn’t twist. He found the anomaly team getting their things together to go home, which was not wholly unreasonable, since it was six o’clock on a Friday evening. Abby, Sarah and Caroline were collected together in the door to Ryan and Lyle’s office, and Lester just about glimpsed Stephen Hart’s rangy, self-effacing figure within. He noticed that Abby and Caroline were actually standing next to each other, which added to his good cheer; he hadn’t been certain that they wouldn’t break into a duel in the middle of the Atrium until about June, and the state of détente that had existed between the two of them since then was wearing on his nerves.

 

            “Ladies,” he said loudly, causing only Sarah to jump; the other two were looking at him the second he turned the corner. “Gentlemen.”

 

            “You look pleased,” Caroline Steel said, with measured enthusiasm, and tucked one corkscrew curl behind her ear. “Did the meeting with Shacklebolt go well?”

 

            “Excellently,” Lester said with satisfaction. “The lease of our new building is confirmed for the New Year, so I estimate we will be moving in in about March.”

 

            “That’s… great,” Abby said, staring at him. “I didn’t- huh.” She dipped her head and turned away.

 

            “Be serious, Miss Maitland,” Lester said, remarkably expansively, he thought. Abby Maitland had never been afraid of speaking truth to power, and Lester knew that in certain circles, she probably held more power and respect than he did. Still, he wouldn’t have tolerated that remark from most people, regardless of their war credentials - but he was well aware that he had turned Abby’s life upside down at least twice, to her detriment. “You can’t have imagined I was going to tolerate these quarters much longer. They’re completely inadequate.”

 

            “We assumed you didn’t have a choice,” Abby said, then bit down on her lower lip and stared at the ceiling. Sarah pulled a face that indicated she thought Abby was being very daring, which drew Lester’s attention to the tank in her arms - and, more ominously, its contents.

 

            “Dr Page, what is that?”

 

            “Nothing,” Sarah said, smiling brightly.

 

            “An ammonite,” Lyle said, extricating himself from the office with some difficulty and grinning at Sarah. “An ammonite called Nefertiti.”

 

            “Dr _Page_ ,” Lester said.

 

            Sarah flushed terracotta, Abby rolled her lips together to stop laughter escaping, and Caroline emitted a ladylike giggle. Lester could hear sounds of masculine amusement from inside Ryan’s office, too, which indicated that the anomaly team had been over this with each other, and that everyone found it very amusing that Sarah had collected an ammonite to keep.

 

            “The anomaly had closed,” Sarah said defensively. “It was in a chlorinated pool. It was dying!”

 

            “And you couldn’t have left it to our inestimable Muggle colleagues to rescue? Considering that they have the facilities, which we will not have until March?”

 

            “They were late,” Sarah explained, dark eyes wide and pleading with him to understand. “She would have died before they got there!”

 

            Lester reflected that there was a downside to his anomaly team’s methods of operating. Although their piggybacking off Connor Temple’s anomaly detector meant that they received up-to-date information on the anomalies’ appearances and disappearances, Floo, Apparition and broom travel meant that the magical team generally arrived well before the Muggles had got out of the M25, even though Claudia had successfully concluded the battle to be awarded blues and twos status at the beginning of December, so they now moved a great deal faster than they had done before. This sometimes made life difficult; Lester wasn’t sure he would ever forget Caroline’s vivid description of the occasion on which she and Sarah had been forced to Disillusion each other and stand very quietly in a corner behind a filing cabinet while the ARC ransacked the room for small prehistoric bugs. The small prehistoric bugs had bitten them both, resulting in an unhappy evening in a Muggle hospital having blood tests, and Sarah, who lacked Caroline’s wartime experience or stringent training, had been rendered profoundly nervous by the experience, which the Aurors had reacted to in a time-honoured fashion. As a result, when Lyle delivered her to the hospital, all the blood tests had come up clean except for the technician’s note that her blood alcohol level was not what it ought to have been, and Sarah had been obliged to endure a long lecture about wasting NHS time with drunken fancies.

 

              He realised that the entire team – Stephen and Ryan now having vacated Ryan’s office – were looking at him with expressions that ranged from profound amusement to doe-eyed pleading, and he heaved a sigh as if he’d been thinking over the wisdom of keeping an ammonite all this time.

 

            “I suppose you can keep it,” he sighed. “Just until we find a suitable anomaly for you to put it back through. But for the love of Merlin, don’t tell anyone it’s an ammonite.”

 

            Sarah eyed the ammonite Nefertiti. “Baby Nargle?” she suggested.

 

            “No,” Lester said firmly. “You’ll bring Luna Lovegood down on us, and the Minister is leaning towards keeping the anomalies quiet for now. A five-page exposé in the Quibbler is not quiet. Pick a magizoological animal she isn’t interested in. Anyway, don’t you have weekend plans? You look like you have weekend plans. Stop cluttering the floor up at the expense of the wizarding taxpayer and hop to it.”

 

            Nobody moved.

 

            “We’d like to go for drinks,” Caroline said patiently, “but you and Lyle are in the way.”

 

            Lester moved to the side. “Drinks?” he said, surprised, as Caroline, Abby and Sarah filed past him. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around the notion of Abby voluntarily spending leisure time with Caroline.

 

            “Sorceress, down the end of Horizont Alley,” Sarah said informatively. “Cocktails. Happy Hour. How could we not?”

 

            “Are you taking your colleagues?” Lester enquired, dumbfounded, as the press of people in the corridor required him to move along with them.

 

            “It’s a lesbian bar,” Sarah said, bestowing a very bright smile on him. Abby looked at the floor and tried to hide a grin, and Ryan chuckled; behind him, Lester felt Lyle shake with unsounding laughter. “So no.”

 

            “Quite,” Lester drawled. “Are you taking the ammonite?”

 

            Sarah’s face brightened further, and she opened her mouth.

 

            “No,” Abby said, before Sarah could get a word out. Sarah closed her mouth again, and grinned irrepressibly. “We’re taking Nefertiti home. I just hope to God your owl doesn’t think she’s prey, Sarah.”

 

            “Re-Harakhte would never be so rude,” Sarah said, at which point Lester gave up on understanding what was happening, which was a mistake because the next thing he knew Sarah was talking to him. “How about you? Plans?”

 

            “Networking do,” Lyle answered for him as the lift arrived. “Boring as fuck, but we might go out to eat afterwards.”

 

            “Is this a networking do for people who do dodgy things within the confines of government?” Stephen asked as they got into the lift. Fortunately, it was deserted.

 

            “That’s certainly one way of putting it,” Lester said. “I suppose so. We may see Claudia Brown. I would say hello from all of you, but she thinks at least two of you are dead.”

 

            Stephen folded his arms and stared out of the lift grate.

 

            “Say hello from me,” Abby said, glowering at Lester. “You can tell her I asked you to write a reference or something.”

 

            “I shall certainly pass on your best wishes,” Lester said coolly. “As I know she wishes all of you the best. When her new team aren’t busy falling through the ceiling.”

 

            A stunned silence greeted this remark. Lester felt Lyle’s shoulders shaking with laughter where they touched his.

 

            “I understand her head of security and an obstreperous former policeman on her team took it upon themselves to test the security,” Lester elaborated. “Which involved crawling through the air vents. They fell out into Claudia’s PA’s office, whereupon Claudia’s PA almost shot them.”

 

            Sarah sniggered unashamedly.

 

            “Lorraine Wickes?” Ryan asked. “Tall girl, black, mid twenties, dresses like a Boden catalogue?”

 

            “I believe so,” Lester said. “Why?”

 

            “Richards still has an enormous crush on her.”

 

            “What, Blade?” Caroline exclaimed, dropping the small mirror she was using to fix her lipstick (a vibrant, fluorescent pink). “But he’s –”

 

            “Psychotic,” Sarah supplied, retrieving the mirror and slopping some of Nefertiti’s water, and added hastily: “In a good way!”

 

            Ryan’s eyebrows quirked. “I know what you meant.”

 

            “Has he managed to see her since the projects divided?” Stephen said.

 

            “It is possible to keep up with friends in both worlds,” Lester said, with a vague pang of guilt for the Muggle friends he had made when he was working at Downing Street, and had seen less of lately than he might have liked.

 

            “Especially if you fancy the pants off them,” Lyle added, and Lester managed, by the exercise of inhuman amounts of patience, not to roll his eyes when Lyle goosed his arse. Hopefully nobody else had seen that, since Lester had his back to Lyle and was facing everyone else, but Ryan’s expression said he knew exactly what Lyle had just done. “And let’s face it, if she almost shot someone for falling through her ceiling, she’s probably a match for the crazy bastard.”

 

            The lift clattered to a stop in the entrance to Auror headquarters, and the grate shuddered open. “And on that charming note,” Lester said, “have a good weekend, everyone. I look forward to seeing you all bright and early on Monday morning.”

 

            There was a traditional chorus of half-hearted groans, and Lester smiled as he left headquarters, and, with Lyle, headed for the Floo grates lining the Atrium. The Ministry’s Floo lines were the most efficient in the country, but an awful lot of people wanted to leave work on a Friday afternoon, so Lester and Lyle had to wait some time at the shortest queue they could find before they reached the grate, called out the name of Lester’s nearest Floo stop, and emerged in an obscure bit of Chelsea. Leaving the Floo stop, which was disguised as a public toilet, behind them, they headed along the river, towards Lester’s flat. The walk was not a terribly long one, and in the crisp dark December evening with Lyle slouching comfortably along beside him, Lester rather enjoyed it.

 

            “We need to be there at eight, don’t we?” Lyle said idly as they turned to cross the river.

 

            “Mm,” Lester said. “We’ll be fine, provided we change fast.”

 

            “Does that mean no surprise blowjobs?”

 

            “Certainly not,” Lester said, smiling benignly at the gaggle of teenagers they had just badly startled. “Wait until we get home.”

 

            Lyle chuckled filthily, and then dragged Lester into a shadow.

 

            “I said no-”

 

            The familiar tug of Apparition yanked at Lester’s stomach, and then he found himself pressed up against the brickwork in a small side-alley next to his block of flats.

 

            “We still don’t have time,” Lester said, straightening his jacket and regaining his composure. “Also, I thought they taught Aurors to be discreet? You do realise Apparition is rather loud, if you don’t silence it?”

 

            “They tried,” Lyle said cheerfully. “I passed by virtue of being more subtle than Nymphadora Tonks. You wouldn’t have known her.”

 

            “I think I would have remembered a name like Nymphadora,” Lester agreed, striding out of the alley. 

 

            “She preferred Tonks,” Lyle said, as they walked through the automatic doors and caught the lift just in time.

 

            “I’m not surprised.”

 

            Lester’s flat was – as usual at the start of the school holidays – a tip. His daughter had arrived home from Hogwarts only yesterday, and had immediately taken off to stay with a friend (and, if Lester knew his daughter at all, dance awkwardly around the pretty little Ravenclaw who had formed the chief topic of her sporadic letters home). She had not bothered to unpack, so shoes lay everywhere, her broom was propped up against the shoe rack, and dirty school uniform lay in a heap in front of the washing machine. Lester closed his eyes to the chaos and swept through to his own room, ignoring the roar from the Gryffindor poster Liz had brought home from school and stuck to her door, and mentally composing a strongly-worded jeremiad on tidiness and _what if we had Muggle visitors, Liz_. His own room was a haven of peace and neatness, or at least it would be until Lyle got to it, and Lester was able to change into the smarter suit, clean shirt and shoes he had set out that morning with decorous haste. Lyle banged around the bathroom, attempting a clean shave, and Lester combed his hair into submission, reflecting that life would be more boring without his daughter and partner but also an awful lot tidier.


	6. Chapter 6

            By some miracle, they were out of the flat again in less than fifteen minutes, and Lyle hailed a taxi to take them to the reception. The taxi ride was uneventful; it ended in traffic, but they were less than five minutes’ walk from the venue, so they wound up getting out early. It had got colder and darker, if that were possible, and Lester’s breath puffed out in front of him, like the dragon he wasn’t. He checked his cufflinks and the exact location of his wand – in the inside pocket of his suit jacket sleeve, where it wouldn’t disturb the fit – then glanced at Lyle, received a nod of confirmation, and forged forwards into the reception. He was immediately accosted by a smiling waiter with a tray full of glasses of fizz, which improved his mood no end. Gallantly, Lyle snagged two as Lester handed his coat in at the cloakroom, and announced approvingly and far too loudly that somebody bright had bought in good prosecco instead of bad champagne.

 

            Lester rolled his eyes and took one of the glasses before Lyle could drain his and move on to a second. “Behave.”

 

            “I’m trying, James,” Lyle said, with not an ounce of repentance in his voice as he handed his own coat over and smiled impishly at the teenaged girl who had been put in charge of them. She dimpled, although it was difficult to tell considering the sheer amount of foundation on her face.

 

            “Yes, you are,” Lester said, sipping at his own prosecco. “Very trying.”

 

            The reception was very much the same as the hundreds of others Lester had been to in the course of a long and much-networked career which had included stints on both sides of the Muggle-Magical divide. The decoration was perhaps a little less tasteless than usual, and the food uncommonly bad, but the people were all the same and the topics of conversation very little different. Lester reflected, for the hundredth time, that Muggle and Magical security forces were a great deal more alike than either side would care to admit. And they all gossiped like hell.

 

            He located Claudia Brown on the other side of the room, dressed in something sharper and more structured than normal; Lester approved, on balance, and also detected the influence of Jenny Lewis. She was being shadowed by the inestimable Captain Becker, a tall, dark and good-humoured figure at her shoulder, which could indicate any of several things.

 

            “She doesn’t think she’s in danger, and neither does he,” Lyle said without prompting, following Lester’s eyes and covering his remark by turning slightly, casually to one side. He had spent very little time on the project compared to Ryan, since integrating Aurors into an allegedly Muggle team of soldiers was always going to be difficult to impossible, and had never met Hilary Becker – at least, not to Lester’s knowledge, and he thought he was fairly well conversant with all the formal and informal connections between the Aurors and their Muggle counterparts. But he did know Claudia Brown when he saw her, and that was apparently enough. “They’re both relaxed and he isn’t armed.”

 

            “Mm,” Lester said, taking a tactical sip of his champagne. “So either she wants somebody who looks very traditional at her shoulder –” the Becker family’s Squib connections had been soldiers since the Napoleonic wars – “or she just doesn’t want to be here and feels like spreading the misery around.”

 

            “Option a,” Lyle said, grinning down at him. “Claudia’s nicer than you are. Are you going to introduce me to her Action Man?”

 

            “Perhaps, but if you start a rumour about them, you’ll be sleeping in barracks for the next month.” Lester had gone to a great deal of trouble to put Claudia where he wanted her, in charge of the ARC, and to fend off a few obvious sharks who had made a play for the position, and who Claudia – for all her many gifts – lacked the experience to stop. He didn’t want her credibility undermined by rumours of affairs with her subordinates, even if it was patently obvious that Captain Becker was gay.  

 

            Lyle sniggered into his wine glass.

 

            “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know,” Lester said, bestowed a smooth smile on the nearest of his connections, and started to work the room. By a process of elimination, and over the course of about half an hour, he made his way – Lyle in tow – over to Claudia’s side of the room, where Claudia and Becker had moved slightly and collected a large knot of the other younger people in the room. Most of them seemed to be arguing about the precise application of a particular piece of legislation, Claudia only half-embedded in the debate and listening just as much as she talked, but occasionally steering the talk in a new direction with her conversation. Evidently that law degree had not gone to waste.

 

            Equally evidently, Captain Becker was not paying any attention. He was texting, and frowning at the screen of his phone – but he looked up and slipped the phone back into his pocket when Lester and Lyle approached, and nudged Claudia almost imperceptibly. Claudia jerked round to see what he was looking at, losing a strand out of her otherwise impeccable chignon, and smiled when she saw Lester and Lyle, side-stepping out of the arguing group.

 

            “James, how nice to see you,” Claudia said, kissing Lester on both cheeks. “And – Lieutenant Lyle, isn’t it? Lovely to see you again.” She shook hands with Lyle, and gave Lester a bright, quizzical look that told him she had definitely clocked their relationship. Well, she was an intelligent woman, he wouldn’t have expected otherwise.

 

            “That’s right, you two have met before,” Lester said, in tones of enlightenment. “Jon is my partner.”

 

            “Congratulations,” Claudia smiled. “May I introduce Captain Becker, a colleague of mine?”

 

            Becker exchanged handshakes with both of them. Lester idly noted the confidence of his grip and stance, and hoped that this boded well for the anomaly project under his protection. 

 

            “I trust no disasters since we last spoke?” Lester said casually to Claudia, as Lyle and Captain Becker engaged in the long and subtle process of sizing up each other – and each other’s connections, service and general usefulness. Considering that one was an Auror and the other was, to all intents and purposes, a wholly Muggle soldier, Lester anticipated certain difficulties. He wondered whether he’d remembered to tell Lyle that Becker was a Squib.

 

            Claudia’s eyes flicked sideways to Becker and Lyle, and then she cast them upwards in silent exasperation. Lester tucked his smirk away where it couldn’t be seen. “All reasonably well,” Claudia said. “Everything’s as much in order as can be expected – although we need more women in the field, the testosterone levels are growing impossible. Poor Jenny says it’s like herding un-neutered tomcats.”

 

            Lester did not recall Jenny having any special success in bringing the field team to heel when it was fifty percent female, but conceded that Danny Quinn constituted a case of testosterone poisoning in and of himself. “I hope she is otherwise well? Do give her my regards. Oh, and Abby sends her best wishes as well – she wrote to me for a reference.”  


            Claudia’s soft face showed surprise for half a second. “Really? I’ll pass that on. Please tell her hello from me – I hope she’s all right, we miss her very much.”

 

            Lester had not attained his present eminence by succumbing to pangs of conscience, not even when they concerned the breakup of his pet project. He expended his excess emotional energy by mentally cursing Leek and maintained a smooth façade. “She seems positive, although I’m sure you realise as well as I do that the last year has been extraordinarily difficult for her. I hardly think she would have got back in touch with me if she hadn’t needed the reference.”

 

            “I hope you wrote her a glowing one,” Claudia said, running a finger around the rim of her glass. Apple juice, Lester noted. “I’d take it kindly if you gave her my contact details, too. In case.”

 

            “Certainly,” Lester said. “To both. Although I can’t promise she’ll write to you.” He honestly wasn’t sure if Abby would get back in touch. Sarah’s flat wasn’t especially Muggle-friendly, considering the abundance of flying carpets, Wizarding neighbours, and moving photographs, and Lester knew Abby and Sarah paid for a house-elf’s cleaning services. Having severed herself messily and painfully from her Muggle connections for the second time, and embedded herself in a wizarding world Lester knew she had cause to mistrust, he doubted that Abby would choose to contact the Muggle project’s members – even to Claudia. Abby knew, Lester was sure, that her departure had been unexpected, and had left a great deal of unanswered questions. He did not think she would want to put herself into the position of having to answer them with lies.

 

            “Of course,” Claudia murmured, sipping at her juice, and her eyes drifted over Lester’s shoulder. He turned slightly, and saw that Lyle and Becker seemed to have formed some kind of rapport, and that other men he had no hesitation in labelling as ‘military’ were drifting towards then. Like evidently recognised like. “I didn’t know you and Lieutenant Lyle were together.”

 

            “Oh. Yes, we’ve been together for a while. I’ve known him for… some years, now.” Since the war, Lester thought, but could hardly say to a Muggle who had probably been studying for her A-Levels when he had been sending his family into exile and playing at being a double agent. “I was as surprised as anyone when he arrived on the project, though. Military bureaucracy is beyond even me.”

 

            Claudia laughed. “They are impossible, aren’t they?”

 

            “Quite. May I say, Claudia, you’re looking very well this evening.”

 

            Claudia wrinkled her nose and tugged at the slate-blue fabric of her dress with her free hand. “Jenny dragged me out shopping last weekend. I understand it’s a sister’s prerogative to have strong opinions about your wardrobe, and I suppose she was right to say I needed an update, but it was the most unbelievably exhausting experience.”

 

            “Well, it seems to have worked for you,” Lester remarked. “I do find it useful to – hm. Project an image.”

 

            “Hence the braces.” Claudia was almost certainly laughing at him.

 

            “I am very fond of my braces,” Lester began, prepared to defend his sartorial choices to the death as part of light, amusing social small talk, and stopped dead when he heard a phone’s faint buzzing and saw Claudia clap a hand to her handbag. “Allow me,” he said, possessing himself of her glass of juice, and received a muddled thank-you as Claudia dug through her handbag for the offending object. Nearby, Becker withdrew slightly from the group he had been part of, checking his own phone.

 

            “No trouble, I trust?” Lester said casually.

 

            “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Claudia said, grimacing at her phone, “and nothing the people already on duty can’t handle.” She sent a text, tucked her phone away and glanced at Becker, who nodded and slid seamlessly back into his conversation. Lester was pleased to note that he had not sent Claudia an idiot when he recommended Becker.

 

            Lester’s own phone buzzed, and he fished it out of his pocket. “It never rains but it pours,” he observed to Claudia, and glanced down at the screen. It was from Caroline Steel, the one member of the wizarding anomaly team who could be trusted to have a functioning mobile phone on her at all times, since Sarah’s rapport with Muggle technology was tenuous, Ryan tended to fry his phones in the Aurors’ armoury by accident, and Abby and Stephen had spent too long in hiding to trust mobiles in general. They both owned one, since they would have stood out a bit if they hadn’t, but they kept accidentally-on-purpose losing or forgetting them. Lester had given up complaining about it.

 

            _Anomaly in the Highlands_ , Caroline had texted. _Arranging for a Portkey now, should be there in a couple of hours. I could expedite it, but no reason to believe it’s more urgent than the usual, and I don’t hate the Portkey clerk enough._

 

            Lester had a sudden thought, and forcibly suppressed a wince at the thought of what else was lurking in the Highlands – to wit, the school that housed a generation of British wizarding children at any given time and was only just completing its post-war renovations. Lester did not fancy going toe-to-toe with Minerva McGonagall over the welfare of her school; apart from anything else, the professor was understandably sceptical of explanations that began and ended with ‘national security’. Thank Merlin term had finished. _Acceptable. How close to Hogsmeade?_ he texted back.

 

            _Closer than I would like_ , Caroline wrote back. _But not within ten miles. Have alerted the local Magical Law Enforcement that there may be trouble._

 

            _Excellent_ , Lester typed, carefully ignoring Claudia’s increasing curiosity. _Best of luck, Miss Steel_. He slipped his phone away and gave Claudia a brief smile. “I apologise. So rude of me. Remind me – where were we? Oh yes. Braces.”

 

***

 

            “I can’t even,” Connor said sadly, standing on the pavement outside his flat in boxers, a dressing gown and his boots. His laces were trailing everywhere, his hair was sticking up in all directions, and he was starting to shiver in the midnight chill.

 

            “You can’t even what?” Ditzy demanded, hands on his hips. “Dress under pressure?”

 

            “Nothing,” Connor said, tying his dressing gown more tightly. “Now you know I’m awake can I go back inside and get dressed?”

 

            “Of course,” Cutter said magnanimously. He hadn’t even left the office when the anomaly detector went off, taking the opportunity to work late since Jenny was out with her fashion PR friends, drinking cocktails and being exquisitely rude about most of their acquaintances. So he was awake, and Quinn, who had insisted on meeting them at Connor’s with his motorbike as if he thought he was going to be allowed to bike all the way up to Scotland, was too. But Connor was notoriously good at falling back to sleep after late-night summons, and the ARC had been forced to pay for the door last time Captain Becker had broken it down, semi-justifiably concerned that Connor had been kidnapped on the way into work or something. So Claudia had instituted a policy where they had to go to Connor, and actually lay eyes on Connor awake and upright, before leaving on a late-night shout. Considering that they definitely needed Connor at anomalies, it didn’t add unnecessary time, and it saved a surprising amount of bother and fuss.

 

            “Mmrgh,” Connor said, and trod sadly back inside, before apparently thinking better and coming back out again. “Just keep it quiet, okay? And hide the weaponry. My neighbours think I’m in the mob.”

 

            “Either that, or you’re James Bond,” Quinn suggested, leaning over his motorcycle in a devil-may-care fashion. Cutter wondered if he was perhaps trying to hit on Connor, or if swagger was his default position.

           

            “Just call me Temple, Connor Temple,” Connor replied wearily, making the famous gun sign with his fingers and turning it into a fuck-you sign. “Seriously, did you have to rev your motorbike when you came down the street? If you woke up the twins in 42B again Kamila is going to kill me.”

 

            Danny looked abashed, which he bloody well ought to, in Cutter’s opinion. “Sorry, mate.”

 

            “Yeah, right,” Connor sighed, and headed back inside again.

 

            Danny looked at Cutter. “What healthy twenty-five-year-old is sound asleep at eleven o’clock?”

 

            Cutter shrugged. “Goes with the all-nighters on the ADD, I suppose.”

 

            “Neighbours never minded the noise at his old place,” Danny said, but not as if he was trying to exculpate himself, more as if he was trying to work his way towards understanding Connor. Cutter had noticed that he had a tendency to take Connor under his wing, and approved, in a vague sort of way.

 

            “He shared that with Abby,” Ditzy said. “Miss Maitland. You didn’t know her. She left, so he got another flat.”

 

            “Dodgy area,” Danny remarked.

 

            “Abby wasn’t scared of anything,” Cutter said, jamming his hands into his pockets. “Where’s Connor?”

 

            “Here, Professor,” Connor said, closing his front door behind him. He was now fully dressed, although his hair was sticking out from under his hat in every conceivable direction, and he looked exhausted. He also had a small weekend bag with him, which indicated that he had learnt from previous incidents where they’d spent more than forty-eight hours at an anomaly and he’d had no spare boxers. Cutter was fond of Connor, but drew the line at lending him underwear.

 

            “Four minutes and forty-two seconds,” Danny said. “Respectable. But you didn’t need to shave.”

 

            “Abby says I look like a Labrador if I don’t,” Connor mumbled, and scrambled into the back of one of the ARC’s black cars, looking like he might fall back asleep right there.

 

            “I should have met this Abby,” Danny remarked to Cutter.

 

            “Well, best of luck, lad,” Cutter said, fully aware that Danny was two years older than him. “She’s out of all this.”

 

            Danny raised his eyebrows, whistled, and slung a leg over his motorbike, turning on the engine as quietly as possible (which wasn’t very). “Where next, guv?” he said to Captain Jacobs, who had been on duty in Captain Becker’s absence. He was reasonably new, and Cutter hadn’t decided if he liked him or not.

 

             “Miss Lewis’s house,” Captain Jacobs said, and Cutter got into the back of the same car as Connor. Connor was slumped in one of the back seats with his head leaning back against the rest, being interrogated by Ditzy, who had twisted around in his front seat to stare at Connor. It might have worked better if Connor had his eyes open, but he didn’t.

 

            Cutter exchanged glances with the driver, a brown-eyed lad universally known as Kermit, who was doing a very bad job of not smirking. Cutter grinned at him and slammed the door shut as Captain Jacobs’ car pulled out of its space and headed down Connor’s road. Absently, Cutter glanced up at the block of flats Connor lived in – slightly run-down, small, tottering, but one of Cutter’s few clear memories from the months immediately after Stephen’s death was the way Connor himself had looked small and lost in Abby’s oversized flat, so maybe this was the better option – and noticed a lighted window, and a spotty teenage boy gazing down at them, mouth open.

 

            Danny’s motorbike roared as quietly as possible down the street, and Kermit turned the car they were in to follow on, the soldiers evidently having decided that if they couldn’t stop Danny getting on his motorbike they were damn well going to make it as difficult for him to zip off on his own as possible. The curtain fell over the teenage boy’s window, and Cutter dragged his attention back to Ditzy’s sustained scolding.

 

            “- do we have to talk about healthy working patterns again, mate?” Ditzy was saying.

 

            “No,” Connor sighed, head lolling.

 

            “Because this is _not healthy_.”

 

            “Nothing we do is healthy or safe,” Connor pointed out reasonably. “Remember Lester used to say that?”

 

            “Vividly,” Cutter said dryly, “but Lester wasn’t keeping the anomaly detector ticking over. There’s a difference between that sort of thing and taking risks in emergencies. Connor, you’re doing your brain a disservice if you’re not sleeping regularly, and we need your brain in top condition.”

 

            Connor brightened slightly, and went so far as to open one eye, and Ditzy turned back to face front again. “But Professor, don’t you –”

 

            Cutter spotted the flaw in his reasoning and hastily headed him off at the pass. “Yes, but I’m a broken-down old fart, and you’re not.”

 

            “I dare you to tell Jenny that, Professor,” Connor said almost cheerfully.

 

            Cutter took refuge in a harrumph. “Do your bloody seatbelt up, Connor.”

 

            Connor obligingly strapped himself in, snuggled his head into the side of the car, and fell asleep almost immediately. His jaw dropped slightly and he began to drool.

 

            “Hmph,” Cutter said, and patted down his pockets for a hankie, but he hadn’t got one. And then again, Connor was a grown man and Cutter wasn’t his mother. His spit was his own problem.

 

            They stopped briefly at Jenny’s house, which Cutter almost-but-not-quite shared with her. Jenny had managed to get home from her girls’ night in time to change into a more anomaly-suitable outfit, and was, in fact, standing just inside the front door drinking from a thermos of coffee and tapping her toe idly against the small wheelie suitcase and battered, ancient expedition bag at her feet. Cutter recognised his go-bag, and gave her a smacking kiss on the cheek.

 

            “You are a queen among women, Jenny Lewis.”

 

            Jenny produced a second thermos of coffee, and Cutter took it, cracked the cap and inhaled. Strong enough to raise the dead, take the varnish off tables and send the Dean to hospital; just the way he liked it.

 

            “I take it back,” he said, grinning at her. “Empress.”

 

            Jenny smiled. “Consider it my good deed for the week.” She took it away from him. “And now you can take the cases to the car while I lock up.”

 

            “Yes ma’am,” Cutter said promptly, knowing which side his bread was buttered on, and took both out to the small cavalcade. Captain Jacobs was arguing with Danny about the motorbike.

 

            “I’m not parking it on a random street and leaving it there for god knows how long,” Danny said, evidently frustrated. “We could be in Scotland till Christmas!”

 

            “You’ll jinx us,” Cutter remarked, and fished his own set of keys to Jenny’s house from his pocket. “There’s off-road parking in the mews at the back. If you like.”

 

            “Christ, how posh is Jenny?” Danny demanded, but accepted defeat when it was right in front of him and took the keys from Cutter.

 

            Cutter hefted the bags. “I’ll load these up in the back of your car, if you don’t mind. Jenny’ll probably want to make phone calls and Connor’s out like a light.”

 

            Captain Jacobs nodded. “Lieutenant Owen will enjoy keeping Quinn in line.”

 

            “Good for him,” Cutter said, and Corporal Carter took the cases away from him and slung them into the boot of Jacobs’ car. Jenny came over, bearing both thermoses of coffee, and swept a searing glance along the cavalcade. Her eyes narrowed.

 

            “I swear to God, if I have to track down Quinn –”

 

            “I sent him around the back to park his bike,” Cutter intervened hurriedly. “Didn’t want him to have an excuse to take it to… wherever we’re going.”

 

            “Oh,” Jenny said, deflating. “Good.” She took a healthy gulp of her own coffee. “We’re going to Scotland, by the way. The Highlands. You should feel right at home.”

 

            “I grew up in Glasgow, lass.”

 

            Jenny’s eyebrows twitched as if she were thinking ‘same difference’, but at this fortunate moment Quinn reappeared and threw Cutter’s house keys back at him. Cutter caught them.

 

            “Nice garage,” Quinn said to Jenny.

 

            “Thank you,” Jenny said graciously.

 

            Cutter opened the door to Captain Jacobs’ car for her, and she climbed in, already on her Blackberry.

 

            “I’ll go with Connor,” Danny said. “Has he fallen asleep yet?”

 

            Cutter shook his head. “Out like a bloody light.”

 

            “Soldier boy worries about him, you know,” Danny remarked.

 

            “I think we all worry about Connor,” Cutter said, getting into the car before Jenny could stick her head back out and tell him to stop being profound and get in the car, they had an anomaly to attend. “He’ll be fine.”


	7. Chapter 7

            Several hours earlier, Caroline Steel fixed her mind on one particular spot in the Scottish Highlands, turned on her heel in Epping Forest, and vanished with a loud crack. When she reconstituted herself, she was standing on a bare hillside in the bitter cold, and the rest of the wizarding anomaly team were popping into view around her, with a series of similarly loud noises. Fortunately, the area was deserted.

 

            Caroline tucked her scarf more snugly into her collar, and congratulated herself on having accurately remembered exactly how bloody cold it was in Scotland in mid-December. It was also pitch black. “ _Lumos_ ,” she muttered, and the tip of her wand lit with a steady, soft glow that struck eerie, Avada Kedavra-green sparks off Corporal Richards’ eyes. Caroline carefully did not flinch; she’d heard the crack of his Apparition just before hers, but hadn’t realised he was quite so close.

 

            “Personal space,” she said mildly, flashing Richards a toothy smile.

 

            “Sorry, Miss Steel,” Richards said, moving away a little.

 

            Stephen and Ryan appeared to her right, Stephen having Apparated Side-Along with Ryan, presumably to avoid any more nasty Splinching incidents, and Stephen stumbled as they hit the ground. Ryan held him up by one arm, and Caroline took the opportunity to admire his gallantry, and also the fine figure of a man he made in his Auror winter-weather gear, wand in hand. Stephen didn’t look half bad either. In fact, Caroline mused, performing a swift head-count of the anomaly team as the sound of Apparition died down, they made a very handsome couple, and on the whole, she approved.

 

            Not that they would care. Caroline met Abby’s ice eyes, and smiled briefly, meaningless. Abby gave her an equally sincere smile back as she levered Sarah off the floor. Sarah would have come in for a perfectly smooth landing if she hadn’t immediately tripped over a rock. Caroline sympathised.

 

            Stephen, now standing on his own two feet, looked at Caroline, and she nodded. He pulled out a compass and squinted at it in the glow of Ryan’s Lumos. “It’s definitely close by, the compass is going demented.”

 

            Abby laid her wand on her own palm and said quietly: “Point me.” The wand levitated off her palm and twisted in the air until it pointed somewhere off into the distance. She and Stephen compared the compass and wand, frowning, and then Stephen said “This way,” and started to head off down the hillside.

 

            “I don’t understand that,” Sarah said frankly, her breath puffing out in dragon’s smoke clouds before her.

 

            “Me neither,” Caroline said, and started to pick her way down the hillside. “Didn’t you bring gloves, Sarah?”

 

            “No,” Sarah said cheerfully. “Waste of time going back for them if we’re not going to be out here long, and there are such things as heating charms.”

 

            Caroline fished through the pockets of her coat and discovered her spare pair of gloves. “Here. Heating charms are a waste of energy, and –” she smiled cheekily and made her tone flirtatious, to make it a joke – “if you’ve jinxed us and we’re out here till Christmas, I’ll kill you.”

 

            “I would never!” Sarah gasped, mock-furiously, following Abby, Stephen and Captain Ryan around a corner. Richards was sticking as close as a shadow to them, and the other Aurors fanned out, moving into position around the team. Caroline always found their professionalism comforting. “Jinxes are for kids who can’t get over their House rivalries. I always favour a good hex myself.”

 

            Caroline laughed.

 

            “Seriously, do you think we’re going to be here very long?” Sarah asked, a few minutes later. “Because I need to feed Nefertiti and Re-Harakhte.”

 

            Caroline winced.

 

 

            The anomaly wasn’t very far away; they came to it quite quickly, and discovered – to nobody’s surprise – that they were the first to have reached it. It was very late at night, absolutely freezing, and few wizards were in the habit of investigating strange lights in the night by themselves these days. They would more likely call the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and the DMLE, recognising a problem that wasn’t strictly law enforcement, would hand it over to the Aurors – which would lead them straight back to the anomaly team. The Hogwarts area wasn’t exactly full of Muggles, and even if the Muggle anomaly team had the helicopter support they wanted (which they didn’t), it would still be hours before they arrived on the scene.

 

            The anomaly whirled gently in the open, frosty air, and Stephen knelt to examine the ground around it for creatures’ imprints; Abby saw Ryan’s hands twitch as if he wanted to be carrying a rifle, and his fingers settle resignedly around his wand. Abby herself walked up to the anomaly, drew her own wand, and stuck her head through. It was warm and getting dark – clearly evening – and it felt humid. Abby could see some flowering plants by the light of the setting sun, and a couple of small mammals with coarse brown fur, sprawling legs and dull, dark claws. They moved at quite a clip.

 

            Blade Richards appeared through the half of the anomaly Abby wasn’t standing in. Unlike Abby, he didn’t just stick his head through, but walked through entirely. The ground was evidently swampy, because his feet in their heavy brown boots sank into it slightly. “Miss Maitland.”

 

            “I’m all right here,” Abby said firmly. Blade had been a Hogwarts student on the run when she had been, and she remembered him from Ravenclaw; they’d got on reasonably well, although Blade didn’t talk much. She hadn’t seen him much during the war, but she knew enough of him to know the circumstances behind his nickname – he certainly hadn’t had that at Hogwarts – and to trust that he wouldn’t just drag her through the anomaly by the scruff of her neck. If nothing else, he knew she’d hex him on instinct, and the team’s Auror contingent had a healthy respect for Abby’s duelling skills.

 

            “You’re unnerving Dr Page, and the boss will have a fit if you stick around with your head through an anomaly,” Blade said. “He sent me after you. Got what you wanted?”

 

            “One second.” Abby pointed her wand at the closest small mammal and muttered “ _Lumos_ ,” under her breath. It tilted its head up to look at the strange light, and its eyes flashed unearthly yellow back at her. “Tapetum lucidum. That’s what I wanted.”

 

            Blade raised an eyebrow at her as he followed her back through the anomaly.

 

            “It maximises the ambient light,” Abby said. “So they’re able to see better in the dark. Which means – Stephen, what have you got?”

 

            The Scottish midnight seemed even darker than it had done before, despite the glittering chips of starlight above, but somebody – probably the eminently practical Caroline – had spelled a trio of glowing lights into existence, so Abby could see Stephen get to his feet and dust off his knees.

 

            “Small mammals,” he said, to poorly-disguised groans from some of the Aurors, who were not in favour of animals that were so small they were hard to find and capture. Stephen grinned. “Probably five or six of them. They’ve got claws, but they’re probably not too sharp, more for digging than anything else.”

 

            Abby nodded. “I reckon it’s Cretaceous through there,” she said, and described the scene and small mammals. “They looked like diggers to me – they’re insectivores, probably.”

 

            “Hm,” Stephen said, and frowned. “This is where we need Connor’s database or Cutter’s brain.” He scrubbed a hand over his handsome face, clearly thinking hard. “Yanoconodons, maybe.”

 

            “Yanoconodons,” Sarah said to a quill hovering in midair beside her, poised expectantly over a notebook. “Cretaceous. What are Yanoconodons?”

 

            “Small brown things that look like a cross between a large rat and a mole,” Abby said. “Apparently.”

 

            Sarah nodded and repeated this description. The quill scribbled away, and the rest of the team watched her.

 

            “Remind me to buy you a packet of biros,” Caroline said.

 

            “But then I’d have to take notes myself,” Sarah said reasonably, “and that would be inconvenient.”

 

            Abby and Stephen, the designated halfway-to-Muggle members of the group, rolled their eyes; Abby was surprised to see that Blade and Ryan did so too, and then mentally smacked herself for forgetting that Blade was as Muggleborn as she was, and Ryan had spent most of his adult life in a thoroughly Muggle institution.

 

            “The bad news is,” Stephen said, “they’ve gone off in all different directions.”

 

            “The biros?” Sarah said, a sparkle of mischief lurking in her dark eyes.

 

            Stephen grinned at her. “Unfortunately, no. The Yanoconodons.”

 

 

            Stephen was perfectly right; the Yanoconodons _had_ gone off in all different directions. The team chased them throughout the rest of the night, successfully re-capturing three (one of which bit Sergeant Reilly, who uttered several ripe oaths and flung it back through the anomaly like a particularly vicious gnome that had got into the garden). They were mostly tractable enough to be picked up if you were an experienced animal handler and prepared for them to squirm, which meant that Yanoconodon-handling became Abby’s job.  The sky turned from inky black to grey above them and the stars faded as Abby carried the third Yanoconodon through the anomaly, privately marvelling at the texture of its fur and its crocodile-legs scrabbling in midair. When she returned, Sarah had packed away her quill and notebook and the team were standing ready to go, looking tense and urgent.

 

            “There are tons left!” Abby exclaimed, drawing her wand by reflex. “You’re not planning to just leave the anomaly?”

 

            “Listen,” Stephen said, and Abby paid attention long enough to hear several approaching cars. The Muggle anomaly team.

 

            “Shit,” Abby said, a stab of panic going through her as she realised that Connor and Cutter would be coming right up this hill in moments. There was no cover available, nothing to hide behind and no inconspicuous corner to tuck her Disillusioned self into and pray that the umpteen members of the SAS trampling all over the place didn’t hear her.

 

            “Time to go,” Caroline said briskly. “Back to our arrival point, it’s sheltered enough.”  


            Abby concentrated, muttered the incantation to muffle the sound of her Apparition, and turned on her heel. With a variety of small noises – some quieter than others – the entire team disappeared into the misty grey dawn and reappeared again at their Apparition point, startling a hiker.

 

            “Bollocks,” Ryan said. “ _Obliviate_. Lovely day for a walk, isn’t it, sir?”

 

            The hiker, somewhat befuddled, nodded pleasantly and moved along. The team watched him go, and moved behind the shadow of some rocks.

 

            “Do you think we can go home now?” Sarah said plaintively to Caroline, stamping her feet and rubbing her hands together in their borrowed gloves. She yawned, and her breath puffed out before her, clouds of new mist.

 

            “Oh, yes,” Caroline said. “I should think so.”

 

 

            Five minutes later, Finn and Ditzy toiled up the hill cursing with Connor’s latest gadget in tow, and came to an abrupt halt before the weakening anomaly and the tracks in the soft ground around it. Small mammals, yes – but also a lot of pairs of sturdy boots and shoes that belonged on sturdy human feet.

 

            “Here,” Finn said, dropping his end of the case. “Somebody’s been here before us.”

 

 

 

***       

 

            There was a tapping at the window of Lester’s office, and he glanced up from his paperwork to see a handsome brown owl standing on the windowsill and eyeing him with unmistakable contempt.

 

            “I beg your pardon,” Lester said mildly, got up, and let the owl in, whereupon it fluttered over to his desk and held out a leg imperatively. Lester removed the offending letter from its leg, and it glided neatly over to the perch in a corner of his office, where it proceeded to turn its nose up at the owl treats available.

 

            Lester raised a supercilious eyebrow, and glanced down at the address, which he recognised from his daughter’s school reports and the occasional letter home remarking on her conduct: _Mr Lester, your daughter’s concern for her brother’s welfare does her credit, and of course she is right in saying that it is not acceptable for fellow students to call young James names because of his House; however, duelling in the corridors is against school rules, and Elizabeth is perfectly well aware of this_. His other eyebrow shot up to join the one already raised to the heavens. If Minerva McGonagall was writing to him, something had evidently gone seriously wrong.

 

            And her bloody owl was probably accustomed to ginger biscuits and whisky, and spoilt for all other forms of sustenance.

 

            Lester returned to his desk, wondering what his anomaly team could possibly have done in their brief sojourn in the Highlands to earn Professor McGonagall’s wrath. Far too many possibilities occurred to him, and he shuddered as he dropped into his chair and cracked the seal on the letter, flicking it open and scanning it. Perfect copperplate informed Lester that Professor McGonagall understood a team of Ministry personnel under his command had investigated a temporal phenomenon in the Hogwarts area, and requested a fire-call at his earliest convenience, as she had reason to believe that further such phenomena had appeared. She was concerned for the Hogwarts wards, and for the wellbeing of the population of Hogsmeade.

 

            “Oh, Merlin’s left _testicle_ ,” Lester muttered, and summoned Caroline Steel.

             

 

            A mere half an hour later (Caroline had been an excellent hire, Lester reflected) Lester was Flooing into Professor McGonagall’s office. He straightened his cufflinks, brushed a little ash off his trousers onto the welcome mat in front of the fireplace, and fixed Professor McGonagall with his smoothest smile. He had never been into the headmistress’ office during his time at Hogwarts, chiefly because he’d never made enough trouble; Dumbledore had entertained all the prefects to supper, but that event had not taken place in his office. He took great care not to stare.

 

            “Mr Lester,” Professor McGonagall said, unbending enough to smile graciously back as she rose from behind her desk.

 

            “Do call me James,” Lester said politely, shaking hands. “I imagine that Mr Lester, to you, is my older son.”

 

            “Fortunately I do not often cross paths with him,” Professor McGonagall said gravely. “Professor Slughorn tells me he’s doing very well in Slytherin.”

 

            “He’s charming and clever,” Lester said. “I had no doubts of his success, only of his good behaviour. He seems to have enjoyed this last term very much, as have my other two children.”

 

            Professor McGonagall almost smiled again. “They are a credit to their Houses and their parents. I take it you received my owl? The matter is of some urgency.”

 

            Lester bit back a peevish ‘so I supposed’, and forcibly suppressed memories of his NEWT-level Transfiguration classes. Professor McGonagall’s face was more lined and her hair greyer than it had been when she’d stared him down over an imperfectly transfigured flowerpot, but her carriage and expressions had not changed in the slightest. “Of course. What exactly happened?”

 

            Professor McGonagall glided back to her desk – an impressive feat, in light of the cane that supported her movements - and took a seat, gesturing to Lester that he ought to sit too. He took advantage of the invitation.

 

            “A student staying over for the holidays was flying around the grounds and saw a curious light very close to the boundary,” Professor McGonagall said. “She told us that it appeared to move, and that she couldn’t see an obvious source for it, and that it flickered. Madam Jones – our current Quidditch teacher - investigated and said she saw something similar very briefly, before the light went out.” She paused. “No Dark magic was detected, but I would appreciate your assurance that we were not under attack. Some of the school’s lesser wards were weakened after the incident.”

 

            Lester’s heart missed a beat, and he dragged composure over himself like a stubborn winter coat. The thought that Hogwarts’ wards, always powerful and raised stronger and higher than ever after the Second Wizarding War, could be damaged by a chance anomaly, was a disconcerting one. “Concerning,” he said levelly. “Magical research into the causes of anomalies, as we call them, is somewhat lacking at present. They are a recent phenomenon, and we are still in the early stages of working with them. However, our Muggle counterparts’ research and our own field experience strongly indicate that these are natural phenomena, not raised by any creature, witch or Muggle.”

 

            Professor McGonagall nodded, but her thin lips pursed slightly. “So you cannot assure me that this will not happen again?”

 

            “I can’t, no,” Lester said, thinking of his team’s earlier Scottish excursion. “This may have been a chance incident, which is unlikely to be repeated, or it may be part of a cluster. Have there been any further sightings?”

 

            “Not of the – anomalies? – themselves,” Professor McGonagall said. “But a creature appeared in the lake yesterday that was decidedly _not_ the giant squid. One of our Muggleborn students informs me that it was a plesiosaur. I thought the two incidents might be connected.”

 

            Lester’s heart plummeted. Christ, if the kid had a camera with him – or her – that would be the end of the anomaly project’s secrecy. “You are probably right, Professor,” he said calmly. “In accordance with the Minister’s wishes, the anomalies are not currently public knowledge. Do you know if the student recorded this incident?”

 

            “He did not,” Professor McGonagall said. “He seems to believe that it came from the same place as the giant squid, and, like the giant squid, departs to find food when necessary.”

 

             “The giant squid,” Lester repeated, rather weakly. He didn’t recall that he’d ever questioned the giant squid’s ability to find food in a Scottish loch, but now that he came to think of it, how was a creature of that size feeding itself in a lake that, while large, wasn’t massive, and also supported a thriving mermaid population? Oh, God, was there a recurring anomaly in the bottom of Hogwarts lake, and if so, what the hell would come out of it next?

 

            “The giant squid, to the best of my knowledge, is still there,” Professor McGonagall said composedly. “And it does not depart to find food. Hagrid feeds it. Duncan Shaw does not need to know that, any more than Jessica Parker needs to know that she saw anything other than a trick of the light.”

 

            “Thank you very much, Professor,” Lester said, feeling a rush of gratitude towards her, and made a note to tell Sarah Page about possible informants in the bottom of Hogwarts lake, supposing she could find a Mermish speaker with the appropriate security clearance. “Nonetheless, this does seem to represent an anomaly cluster. We hadn’t been notified of any anomalies in the area besides last night’s, but I suppose mobile signal is patchy –” Lester remembered he was talking to a distinguished witch with limited knowledge of Muggle technology – “and the detector’s capacity is limited. With your permission, Headmistress, I would like to send a team of four scientists and a few Aurors here, to be on site in case of future anomalies. They are all experienced, reliable operatives.”

 

            Professor McGonagall nodded. “That would be acceptable. We can put them in their old houses, provided they do not wish to stay until the new term in January.” Her sharp grey eyes glittered behind her glasses, as if she suspected Lester of wanting to keep a Ministry team on Hogwarts premises for an unacceptable length of time.

 

            Lester winced at the very thought. “I doubt the cluster will last more than a week. Very few of them do. It would be best to minimise student involvement, so if there are any houses with no students staying for Christmas, perhaps…”

 

            Professor McGonagall narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “Ravenclaw is presently empty; Miss Parker’s mother collected her this morning. Gryffindor is also empty, since Mr Satyagrahi sought permission to stay with Mr Shaw and Miss Callaghan in Hufflepuff rather than stay in his own house alone. Slytherin has two students at present, but both are studying hard for their NEWTs, and unlikely to notice anything short of a dragon. Moreover, both are extremely discreet.”

 

            Lester tried and failed to remember Abby Maitland and Stephen Hart’s house allegiances; he remembered Tom Ryan from his own days in Hufflepuff, and Caroline Steel’s Slytherin background had been very relevant to her early career as an Unspeakable. He couldn’t remember any of the other Aurors’ houses, either. Still, he felt reasonably confident that none of the team were so attached to their old houses that they would insist on staying in places where civilians were likely to get in their way. “Excellent. I will send them to you as soon as possible.”

 

            Professor McGonagall inclined her head. “Thank you.”

 

            “With your permission, I will return to London to make the necessary, ah, arrangements.” Lester rose in response to another gracious nod, and then paused. “Professor?”

 

            “Yes?”

 

            “I should mention that anomalies, although not Dark, can be very, very dangerous,” Lester said. “And they are extremely attractive to curious people. They are not safe to approach.”

 

            Professor McGonagall’s face hardened, and she stood with a sweep of dark red robes. “I will warn staff and students to take care. But send that team as fast as possible, please – I hope you understand, Mr Lester, I will not tolerate any force that endangers Hogwarts. I want these anomalies _off_ our land.”

           

            “Believe me, Professor,” Lester said fervently, imagining one of his children drawing a wand against a tyrannosaur or a terror bird. “I agree.”

 

***

 

            The anomaly detector went off for the third time in the last hour, and every inhabitant of the ARC with an office close enough to hear it uttered some form of expletive.

 

            “Oh my God,” Claudia said wearily to her computer screen, and indulged herself by face-planting into her keyboard. The draft of a quarterly report acquired some new and interesting syllables, and Claudia peeled herself away from her desk before anyone could see her being less than cool and composed and went out of her office to investigate. She leant on the rail and peered down into the atrium; she remembered Lester doing this and looking wise and hawkish, but suspected she just looked peeved. Fair enough. She felt peeved.

 

            “Shut it up, will you?” she called down to the technician, who nodded and disconnected something. The mechanical wailing stopped. “Tell me about it.”  


            The technician stared at the ADD’s screens, and then called up that it was another weak one, in the Highlands, within perhaps fifteen minutes’ drive of the last three.

 

            “Oh, hell,” Claudia muttered, and shouted her thanks and a request to be told if it persisted. The anomaly team had arrived at the first Scottish anomaly in the very early hours of the morning, and besides being disconcerted to discover that there were human footprints around the anomaly, had only just had time to recapture the two escaped small creatures – Yanoconosomethings, Claudia hadn’t caught the name - and return them through the anomaly before it closed. Claudia understood that Danny had actually thrown the last one through. It was now ten o’clock in the morning, and the team were still driving home, and Claudia was trying to decide whether it was worth calling them up and sending them back. The two anomalies that had followed that first one had lasted only a few minutes each, and Jenny was getting sick of ordering U-turns on busy motorways, only to have to reverse her orders minutes later.

 

            Claudia went and lurked in the doorway of Lorraine’s office, and listened to her disposing of a minion from the Highways Agency who was also sick of U-turns on busy motorways. It was deeply cheering, and Claudia waited until Lorraine had put the phone down with a small, demurely satisfied smile before coming over to her desk and saying: “Lorraine, if I could afford to, I’d give you a pay rise. Do you know where the team are?”

 

            Lorraine brought up a programme on her computer screen, the one that tracked the team’s progress using the GPS in their official vehicles (and Danny’s motorbike, the little red dot for which was still blinking grumpily in Jenny’s garage). “Near Blackpool.”

 

            “Excellent,” Claudia said, meaning nothing of the kind. “Ring Captain Becker up and tell him to call a halt, would you? I’d better call Jenny.”

 

            “Certainly,” Lorraine said, and eyed Claudia. “I thought I might put the kettle on. Coffee?”

 

            “Oh God, please,” Claudia sighed, not looking forward to clearing this one with Jenny. Protocol stated that the team should remain in the area of an anomaly cluster for at least two clear days after the last anomaly’s sighting, and that would bring them right up against Christmas Eve if they were lucky. Besides, Claudia seriously doubted Jenny had packed with a week’s stay in mind. Even though Jenny would undoubtedly recognise the necessity for the longer stay, it would make her cross, and she would take that out on everyone around her. “Let’s look on the bright side; Connor will be pleased. He enjoys clusters.”

 

            Lorraine’s mouth twitched and she held the phone away from herself, halfway through dialling Becker’s number. “So Captain Becker will be happy?”

 

            Claudia grinned. “I’m sure it isn’t nice to match-make, but bless him, Becker is _very_ bad at pretending he doesn’t think Connor’s adorable. I’ll just call Claudia. Oh, and Lorraine -”

 

            Lorraine looked up enquiringly, phone to her ear.

 

            “There’s a packet of Jaffa Cakes in my locker,” Claudia said, hand on her own office door. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, don’t you think?”

 

            “Certainly, Miss Brown.”

 

            “ _Claudia_!” Claudia yelled through her rapidly closing door, and the tilt of Lorraine’s head as she turned away hid the tiny smiling change in her face.

 

           

            “It’s fucking cold,” Danny moaned, standing on Blackpool Pier and glaring out to sea, bouncing up and down on his toes and tucking his hands into his armpits.

 

            “Put some gloves on,” Becker said unsympathetically,  folding his arms and watching Jenny stride up and down the pier a little way away, grumpiness in every line of her body. Admittedly, it was below freezing, and the wind off the sea was enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, but Danny was annoying him.

 

            “Didn’t bring any,” Danny said.

 

            “You’re fucking kidding me,” Becker exclaimed, dropping his arms and turning on Danny. “You were planning to bike up to Scotland! It’s December!”

 

            Danny half-grinned, the self-deprecating I-cocked-up smile that made him slightly less irredeemable in Becker’s eyes. “Left my motorbike gloves with the bike.”

 

            “You’re making me look bright, mate,” Connor remarked, pulling a spare pair of gloves from his messenger bag and stuffing them into Danny’s hands. Becker was struck, for perhaps the hundredth time, by how good Connor had become at anticipating and compensating for the ways anomalies were likely to make his life difficult. The scientist clearly felt the cold; his hat was pulled over a beanie that had been yanked down to cover his ears, and he was wrapped in a scarf that covered his mouth but didn’t hide the fact that his nose had gone bright red and his cheeks were flushed with the chill. He didn’t look comfortable, but he wasn’t complaining, either. Becker was led to understand that three years ago, things had been very different, but he couldn’t reconcile the image of a callow student complaining about his allergies with today’s Connor running around muddy bits of the Eocene with hardly a moment’s whining and only a few rueful jokes about how gross it all was.

 

            “This from the boy genius,” Danny said fondly, pulling the gloves on. They were vibrantly striped pink and green; for a moment, Becker considered taking the piss. “Thanks, Connor.”

 

            “I’m twenty-five,” Connor yawned. He’d slept most of the way south – and most of the way north, for that matter – but was clearly not all there yet.

 

            “Everything’s relative, and you’re surrounded by old codgers like me and Cutter,” Danny said cheerfully. “Becker doesn’t count.”

 

            Connor swivelled and squinted at Becker.

 

            “Twenty-six,” Becker supplied.

 

            “Thought so,” Connor said, and added abstractly: “Same age as Abby, her birthday isn’t for a week.” He peered over at Jenny, who had come crossly to rest beside Cutter, leaning against the bonnet of one of the Jeeps, and shivered.

 

            “You should get back in the car if you’re cold,” Becker said. Jenny and Cutter were talking to each other, and then Jenny went back to saying something on the phone.

 

            “Oh, and I shouldn’t?” Danny demanded, grinning.

 

            “You’re a stupid twat who forgot your gloves and whined about it, so no,” Becker said crushingly, hoping he had distracted Danny. Pale eyes dancing, Danny opened his mouth to comment, but Connor got there first.

 

            “Reckon I’ve got time to get a coffee?”

 

            “Probably,” Becker said.

 

            “Couldn’t get me one while you’re at it, could you?” Danny asked.

 

            “Yeah, sure,” Connor said, and proceeded to take a laundry list of coffee orders, most of which he might even remember, before tramping off to the nearest Starbucks. Good. Moving around would keep him warmer, and his occupying the Starbucks would stop the baristas standing with their noses pressed  up against the glass, trying to see what the anomaly team were up to on the nearly deserted waterfront and taking surreptitious pictures on their phones. Becker had reminded everyone to keep weapons out of sight, but on the whole it was more suspicious to go over and stop them taking pictures than it was to let them do it. Besides, he was fairly confident that the distance from the coffee shop meant the pictures’ resolution would be too crap for unambiguous identification.

 

            “Did Miss Wickes say why we had to stop?” Danny enquired.

 

            “No,” Becker said. “Just that there was probably going to be a change of plan and we should all be in one place to discuss it.”

           

            “Great,” Danny muttered. “Back to Scotland.”

 

            Becker grunted and tucked his hands into his pockets. “It’s a cluster. Technically.”

 

            “I thought those were supposed to be about magnetism?” Danny said, brow creasing into a million lines as he proved that he did sometimes listen to Cutter. “I didn’t think the Highlands were full of iron ore.”

 

            “Don’t look at me,” Becker said indifferently. He didn’t give much of a shit about the science, although Connor and Cutter and some of the ARC’s other scientists could get so excited over it he almost wanted to understand it, too. Connor in particular…

 

            Connor emerged from the Starbucks, booting the door open with a toe and balancing about twelve coffees in his hands. The scarf had fallen from his face, and he had his tongue caught between his teeth.

 

            “Shit,” Danny said, and darted across the road before Connor could drop all the coffees.

 

            Becker leaned back against the car as if he hadn’t instinctively moved to do the same, and when he saw Connor and Danny heading towards Jenny and Cutter went over to join them too. Jenny had just hung up on Claudia.

 

            “It’s a cluster,” she said grimly, accepting her coffee from Connor, who had evidently memorised her and Cutter’s orders. “Thank you, Connor. We’re going back.”

 

            “Great,” Danny said. He and Jenny shared an eye-roll, and Cutter grinned at his booted toes. Becker stared into the middle distance.

 

            “A cluster?” Connor exclaimed, eyes lighting up. “But aren’t they always associated wi–”

 

            “So you’ve always said, Connor,” Jenny said patiently.

 

            “I didn’t think –”

 

            “We didn’t either, lad,” Cutter said, grinning openly now as he prised the lid off his coffee.

 

            “How-”

 

            “I think it’s your job to work that one out,” Becker said. A smile was tugging at the corner of his mouth much against his will.

 

            Connor blushed and grinned. “Yeah, well, maybe, but –”

 

            “Discuss it in the car, Connor,” Jenny said, reasonably affectionately. “Thank you again for the coffee.”

 

            Connor scrabbled for his laptop, and Becker caught his coffee before disaster could ensue. Christ, scientists. Talk about overexcited. When did they grow out of this stage? Cutter wasn’t continually leaping for a textbook.

 

            “In the car, mate,” Danny intoned, seizing Connor by the shoulders and pushing him back to the Jeep they’d travelled in.

 

            “Sorry,” Connor said, letting his messenger bag fall to his hip with the laptop still inside. “I just get –”

 

            “Overexcited,” Becker said, handing back his coffee. “We’d noticed.”


	8. Chapter 8

            “Try not to cause too much of a mess, won’t you?” Lester sighed, as the team gathered around a pair of boots Ryan had ruined in the Carboniferous three weeks ago, both of which were glowing gently blue and exuding a distinct aroma of swamp. With a great deal of muttering and nudging, everyone managed to get a finger on some part of a boot.

 

            “I can’t believe the state of these,” Abby said to Ryan, ignoring Lester. “Seriously, what did you do?”

 

            Ryan grimaced.

 

            “These things happen,” Caroline said, a little sharper than usual, and Abby’s platinum blonde head swung round as if she scented battle.

 

            “Back to school,” Stephen said, in a level tone that approximated gloominess, sharing a look with Ryan that suggested he would really rather not be going anywhere near Hogwarts. Sarah didn’t pretend to understand, but then, she’d enjoyed school a great deal.

 

            Lester threw his hands up in the air. “Just don’t disgrace us all at Hogwarts, and don’t recruit a pack of students!”

 

            Sarah bit her lip on a grin and suppressed her excitement along with her amusement. Abby, Stephen and Ryan tended to treat most anomalies as routine or nuisances, with occasional diversions into delight, but the shine hadn’t worn off the anomalies for Sarah. It helped, perhaps, that she hardly ever went out in the field – perhaps once a month to keep her hand in, and then whenever her specific expertise was called for, which wasn’t very often. So this still felt like an adventure for her, particularly considering she’d managed to tidy all her obligations away before leaving. Her Christmas presents were sent and her cards posted, her flat locked up neatly, and the paper she’d been meaning to submit for weeks sent off. Nefertiti was, at present, in the custody of an Auror Abby knew who wasn’t attached to the project but could be trusted to keep his mouth shut about a stray ammonite, and her neighbour had agreed to feed Re-Harakhte and Stephen’s owl Darwin. Sarah was excited, and as she met Ryan’s eyes he gave a vaguely rueful, warm half-smile that seemed to say that he sort of knew what she meant.

 

            “On the count of three, ladies and gentlemen,” Lester said, leaning back against his desk and now sounding bored instead of exasperated, eyes on his watch. “One. Two. Three.”

 

            The Portkeys flashed blue, and Sarah opened her eyes just outside the gates of Hogwarts. The sky was grey and lowering, and a light snow was falling but not settling. Sarah pulled her hat down over her head a little more closely and grinned, settling the straps of her bag a little more securely on her shoulders.

 

            “Is everyone in one piece?” Caroline demanded, standing on her tiptoes and visibly counting heads. “Good, let’s go.”

 

            They walked the short distance up to the heavy wrought-iron gates, and Hagrid loomed up to meet them. “You the lot from the Ministry?” he said, and Sarah smiled up at him; she noticed that Abby and Stephen did too. She’d never been taught by Hagrid, she’d stopped taking Care of Magical Creatures after her OWLs, but she liked him, and of course Abby and Stephen would have known him better and evidently liked him.

 

            “We are,” Caroline said. “To see Professor McGonagall about your…” She hesitated. “Unexpected visitor.”

 

            “Nessie,” Corporal Richards muttered under his breath, and Abby made a sort of squeaking noise that indicated that she’d just suppressed a laugh.

 

            Caroline rolled her eyes as Hagrid busied himself unlocking the gate, a procedure that seemed to involve a certain amount of muttering and waving of a pink umbrella as well as the use of a set of very large keys. “Wrong loch, Richards,” Caroline said. “ _Honestly_.”

 

            “You know, the fossil record suggests that plesiosaurs had a very bad sense of direction,” Stephen said almost gravely as he tucked his hands into the pockets of his black waterproof and stepped through the gates, but his blue eyes were dancing.

 

            “Bollocks,” Ryan said, shepherding the rest of the civilians through. “Everyone knows that was ichthyosaurs.”

 

            “Ha!”

 

            “Thank you, Hagrid, we’ll take it from here,” Caroline said hastily.

 

            “No problem, any time,” Hagrid said, re-locking the gates. “Got a bunch o’ unicorn foals to look in on. Le’ me know if yeh want ter go into the Forest, all right? ’S just the adults will be a bit twitchy right now, and I don’t want them disturbed.”

 

            “Of course,” Caroline said, over the sound of Stephen’s _sotto voce_ crowing to Ryan ‘you were listening in my lectures!’, and Hagrid tipped his hat to her genially and marched off into the snow.

 

            If you could really call it snow. Sarah stuck her tongue out experimentally and tried to taste a flake. It wasn’t the dramatic drifts she remembered from her first year at Hogwarts, a freakishly cold year, nor yet the blanket she’d become accustomed to her in her time at the Salem Institute in Massachusetts. But still, snow.

 

            “Of course Ryan was listening to your lectures, Stephen, he fancies the pants off you,” Caroline said briskly, precipitating an immediate silence and a very well-muffled giggle from Abby. “Sarah, are you done admiring the weather? Right, let’s go. And James was right – we really had better try not to disgrace ourselves. I’m sure I’m not the only one here who’s still terrified of Minerva McGonagall, so please, everyone, let’s just… _behave_.”

 

            They trailed up to the castle a little more quietly than they might have done otherwise, Abby and Sarah occasionally catching each other’s eye and choking on a giggle. Caroline looked very pale, for her, and curiously set-faced, hands tucked into the pockets of her violet coat – a Muggle quilted outdoor coat, not the smart wool witch’s outer robe she usually wore to the office. Sarah watched her take a deep breath and put on a smile as they reached Hogwarts’ front steps and the doors swung open, and Professor Sinistra stood in the front hall to welcome them. Sarah grinned at her – she’d enjoyed astronomy – and got a smile of recognition; Professor Sinistra hadn’t had many NEWT-level students, and fewer still who had corresponded with her since.

 

            “Welcome to Hogwarts,” she said, moving forward; the light that glowed in the front hall shone off her mahogany skin and cerulean outer robe, and glinted off a tacky, be-sequinned Christmas jumper that peeked out from under the outer robe’s loose fastening. Evidently things had changed at Hogwarts; one of the youngest professors, Professor Sinistra had always been relatively informal and, as a half-blood, in touch with Muggle fashions, but she would never have been seen in skinny jeans and a Christmas jumper in front of students during Sarah’s schooldays. “I am the deputy headmistress, Professor Sinistra; I recognise some of you, but I doubt I taught all of you, so the introduction seems worthwhile. Professor McGonagall sent me to meet you, as she is at present dealing with a disciplinary infraction and can’t be spared, but she says she will meet with you just before supper, at perhaps five o’clock? You’ve got just enough time to choose your accommodation. Slytherin is mostly unoccupied, but Ravenclaw and Gryffindor are both entirely empty. Hufflepuff, I’m afraid, has a few too many students in.”

 

            Sarah nudged Abby, seeing the rest of the team nodding to each other or muttering. “Ravenclaw Tower?”

 

            Abby looked up at her and nodded, quick flash of a grin passing over her face, although she had gone curiously quiet towards the end of the walk up to the castle and was now looking at the front hall as if it was strange to her.

 

            “These are the current passwords for Gryffindor and Slytherin,” Professor Sinistra continued, passing out slips of parchment. “Ravenclaw, of course, has a different method of access. Please memorise the passwords and then burn the slips – probably none of you remember the Sirius Black incident in 1993, but nonetheless…”

 

            “Of course,” Caroline said, with a glittering smile.

 

            “Any other questions?” Professor Sinistra enquired, glancing into each face. When she was met only by head-shaking and murmurs of ‘no’, she nodded decisively, and a trio of house-elves popped into being beside her. They were better-dressed than Sarah remembered the house-elves being in her day, and wore Hogwarts badges and rank stripes on their tea-towel togas. “Inky, Sheen and Corky will handle your luggage, if you’ll just indicate where you want to go. See you at supper.”

 

            She turned and left, and a brief conference ensued as the team worked out where they were to sleep. Abby and Sarah had already agreed on Ravenclaw Tower, and Sarah thought of asking Stephen if he wanted to join them, but Stephen had already decided he wanted to go up to his own Gryffindor Tower. Ryan chose to go with him, startling Sarah by saying that much as he’d liked Hufflepuff he didn’t fancy having to cope with a bunch of kids, and the rest of the Aurors followed his lead. Caroline, of course, had asked Sheen to take her luggage down to Slytherin, tipped her, and gone off to find the nearest girls’ toilets before the rest of them had even started getting themselves straight.

 

            “God, I’m so hungry,” Abby muttered, searching the copious pockets of her practical jacket, the one reserved for anomalies, for a snack. “I can smell dinner. D’you think we’ll have to spend ages with Professor McGonagall?”

 

            “I hope not,” Sarah confessed. “She terrified me.”

 

***

 

            Luckily, it was obvious that the bed and breakfast was completely unsuitable for reasons not related to the scandalous state of the electrics – Connor had plugged his laptop in and almost electrocuted himself – or the mould in the bathroom, which looked as if it were rapidly developing sentience. Jenny had limits, and some of them included staying in a place like this for more than half an hour, but she was moderately thankful that she didn’t need to lie to the bed and breakfast’s owners about whether or not she would be taking the three rooms they had on offer.

 

            “I’m sorry, but I just don’t think it will work,” she said, bestowing an appropriately rueful smile on the owners, a couple in their middle sixties. “There are too many of us.”

 

            The husband, whose reddish hair was heavily grey at the temples and whose eyes had almost disappeared in the craggy folds of his face, glanced out of the window at the succession of ARC Jeeps outside and raised his eyebrows. His wife, a rather more expressive personality, said that she thought Jenny was probably right.

 

            “Is there anywhere local you could recommend?” Jenny asked. “A hotel, maybe, or a youth hostel?”

 

            The wife pursed her lips and propped her hands thoughtfully on her solid hips. “There’s a big sporting hotel on the road to Inverness,” she said. “And there’s a youth hostel, but it’s that wee bit close to Hogsmeade, I wouldn’t…”

 

            She exchanged a look with her husband, and they both fell silent.

 

            “What’s wrong with Hogsmeade?” Nick asked, his Scottish accent getting stronger every moment they stayed in Scotland. Jenny refused to admit that she found it attractive. “What kind of a name’s Hogsmeade anyway?”

 

            The bed and breakfast owners exchanged another gnomic look with each other.

 

            “They’re funny round that way,” the wife said eventually. “Always have been. It’s not something any sensible body wants to get messed up in.”       

           

            “’S better than it was ten years ago,” the husband volunteered. “But still… funny.”

 

            “There’s a boarding school and a ruined castle,” the wife said. “The kids come up by train, but I’ve no idea where the train comes from and I’ve never caught it myself. I don’t know about you, Alan. And I’ve never seen any of the teachers, either.”

 

            The husband, evidently Alan, shook his head very definitely. “Seen it, though. Bloody great red steam train.”

 

            “Odd,” Jenny said politely, thinking that writing an entire town off because of a mysterious train service seemed a little mean.

 

            “And they’re all funny in the head,” Alan added. “Every last one of ’em.”

 

            Danny nudged Becker in the ribs, and something that might have been an expression flickered across Becker’s face. Connor disguised a laugh as a sneeze. Jenny knew what they were thinking; what on earth would Alan think of them, if he knew what they did. ‘Funny in the head’ would probably be the least of it.

 

            “What’s the youth hostel called?” Jenny asked. “We’d better get over there as soon as possible. Do you know if it’s busy?”

 

            “Not this time of year, miss,” Alan’s wife said authoritatively. “It’s too cold for trippers.”

 

            Jenny, conscious of the cashmere-lined gloves in her pocket, agreed that it certainly was very cold, and – ten minutes and two sets of conflicting directions later – the anomaly team was on their way to the Highlands Moray Youth Hostel. Connor had only received a small electric shock from the faulty socket, and everyone had steered well clear of the mould, so Jenny thought they’d got off safely and with some potentially useful information about the local area.

 

            She hoped to God the anomalies were nowhere near the school the owners of the bed and breakfast had mentioned, and that said school had broken up for the holidays. It was the middle of December, so it was more likely than not that they had. Jenny crossed her fingers, and tucked her free hand into Nick’s.

 

            About fifteen minutes later, they pulled up outside the youth hostel. It was clearly open for business, lights on against the darkness and a couple of cars in the car park, and it looked big enough to take the lot of them – though there would have to be some doubling up, Jenny suspected. Well, they were all well enough used to that.

 

            Going inside with Nick, Becker, Danny and Connor at her heels, Jenny found it clean and comfortable-looking, although hardly luxurious. It was about as Spartan as most of the youth hostels she’d visited when she was much younger, travelling around Europe and Britain with a few friends, but at least it seemed friendlier and brighter than the bed and breakfast had done. A quick look at the keys behind the desk indicated that only one room was in use, and that there were probably enough beds for their entire party. Jenny awarded herself a point, and addressed a reassuring smile to the young man behind the counter, who looked very startled by their appearance.

 

            It turned out that the youth hostel was run by a young couple with a small son, currently being wrestled into bed by his mother, and that they had only two customers in – a lesbian couple, both wildlife photographers, who shared a room and kept themselves to themselves. The owners of the youth hostel ran popular adventure holidays and fitness camps when it was warmer, but December was extremely slow, and they’d planned to close after the photographers left. Jenny watched the young man, Douglas, realise that the anomaly team intended to book out the hostel for about the next week and maybe longer, and saw his eyes go wide with the lure of unexpected profits.  Especially given the extra charge for meals, which Jenny negotiated without too much difficulty; apparently they were accustomed to catering for large groups of people, in the form of the adventure holidaymakers. And there would be _just_ enough beds, particularly if people lent a hand with putting the sheets on beds that Douglas and Jackie hadn’t thought anyone would want to sleep in for weeks.

 

            Jenny went and made herself a cup of coffee with Jackie’s rather shell-shocked permission – Jackie had returned from putting her son to bed halfway through Jenny’s negotiations with Douglas, which had ground to a brief halt while Douglas explained the situation to his wife and Jackie made a few rapid-fire remarks in what Jenny assumed was Gaelic, mouth hanging open in shock and pretty brown eyes distinctly disbelieving -  and allowed herself half a minute to be smug. Then she applied herself to the serious business of sorting out the sleeping arrangements, since it would only degenerate into a brawl and widespread confusion if the men were left to themselves.

 

            The youth hostel was large considering its isolation, but not that large in real terms, and there were quite a lot of them. Jenny parcelled out the soldiers into the two dorm-like rooms available and left them to squabble over the bunk-beds, while putting herself and Nick into the double bedroom not occupied by the photographers. That left Connor, Danny and Becker out, since they’d had an odd number of soldiers and Becker was the one left over. Jenny knew he would prefer to be somewhere he could keep a close eye on the team he was supposed to protect, and her and Nick’s room was just across the hall from the two remaining rooms, one of which was a single and one of which was a double, and both of which contained only one bed.

 

            Jenny blinked and sat back in the youth hostel’s common room, settling into a comfortable, squishy sofa that looked as if generations of students and thrill-seekers had trampled it. Well, here was a conundrum, she thought.

 

              Putting Becker and Danny in the same room – and by implication the same bed – would be a disaster, and unless there was an airbed or sleeping bag somewhere around the place that nobody had told her about, they really would have to share a bed. Danny had a gift for irritating Becker, and forcing them to share such close quarters would wreak havoc with the team’s delicate dynamics. Putting Connor and Danny in the same room would be less disastrous, but still potentially problematic; Danny had a habit of asking casual questions about the anomaly project that touched on wounds that were still raw for Connor, perhaps because Danny had as much ’satiable curiosity as Kipling’s bloody elephant and the motherwit to realise that he wasn’t likely to get a straight answer to some of his questions from Jenny, Claudia or Nick. Jenny had never known enough about the project’s early days to be helpful, but Claudia had consistently refused to go into the depth of detail Danny apparently considered useful, and the one time Danny had asked Nick a leading question about how the project had started, the explosion had been so violent and the fallout so frosty that Lorraine Wickes had put all of Danny’s expenses forms to the bottom of the queue out of sheer annoyance.

 

            Danny didn’t mean to ask questions that touched on difficult topics, Jenny was certain. At bottom, he was kind and could even be thoughtful. But he had a gift for asking exactly the right questions, a keen nose for bullshit, boundless supplies of inquisitiveness, and a tendency to pry where he ought to shut up – hence his entry to the anomaly project. Jenny even thought that being able to talk more freely about Abby, Stephen, and Captain Ryan (who she’d never known, but had heard a great deal about), as well as some of the other stories that haunted the anomaly project, would do Nick and Connor a great deal of good. She also guessed that Danny might steer clear of sensitive topics if Connor had to share space with him so closely, but…

 

            Jenny frowned at her coffee. She didn’t feel like taking the chance.

 

            A smirk replaced the frown, and she sat up in the sofa with some difficulty; the faded, battered red fabric and cushions had so much give they threatened to swallow her up. On the other hand, putting Connor and Becker together would just be _interesting_. The two got on very well, and Jenny had noticed that Connor brought out Becker’s protective streak and that Becker regularly made Connor laugh and smile. She also thought there was a certain amount of chemistry there, although she would never have guessed that Connor was Becker’s type. Truthfully, she wouldn’t have thought Becker was Connor’s type, either; although the crush on Abby seemed to have faded over time, she’d always been fairly confident Connor was straight.

 

            Decision made, Jenny drained her coffee and went to help with the ARC’s settling in.

 

 

            “Night, lad,” Cutter said casually, several hours later. “Interesting thoughts on the anomaly cluster – we’ll have to investigate some of that tomorrow. I still think there must be a deposit of iron ore somewhere.”

 

            “Thanks. Night,” Connor echoed rather awkwardly, seeing Cutter disappear into the room he and Jenny had taken over. He thought he’d caught a glimpse, in the slice of soft pale light before the bedroom door closed, of Jenny in a simple vest top with her back to the door, creamy shoulders bare as she unpinned her chestnut hair, and then he’d seen a millisecond of her reaction to Nick’s appearance, her warm smile. Connor screwed up his face and stuffed several unwelcome thoughts back where they’d come from; he really, really didn’t want to think about Professor Cutter and Jenny Lewis’s sex life.

 

            “Me neither,” Becker said, and Connor jumped as he realised he’d said that aloud. “Maybe shut the door before you say that again, though; they’ll hear you.”

 

            Connor felt himself go crimson, and hastily closed the door. When he turned round, he found that Becker had stripped to his boxers and was lying on top of the covers despite the slight chill, feet tucked under the woollen blanket at the foot of the bed, clothes neatly folded on top of the small sports bag beside the bed, boots set down next to them. He was sitting up against the ancient bedstead, reading a book Connor had seen him pick off the shelves downstairs, and looked calm and relaxed in a way Connor could never hope to emulate.

 

            “Um,” he said.

 

            “Something the matter?” Becker looked up from his book, then frowned – probably at the fact that Connor was still standing frozen, halfway to the door. “Are you all right sharing with me, Connor? It’s fine if you’d rather not. Douglas and Jackie have probably got an airbed somewhere, I can go in one of the dorms.”

 

            “No, I, uh, it’s fine, I just, er,” Connor said, and went brighter red still and slapped his face. “I mean… I just. Never mind.”

 

            “I promise not to assault your virtue,” Becker said, raising one dark eyebrow. The one with the scar in it. Connor was working on not finding that sexy, but to be honest, he wasn’t doing very well on that one.

 

            Connor babbled something that he was reasonably certain didn’t contain actual words, but at least didn’t also contain the information that Connor really, really wouldn’t mind if Becker did assault his virtue, although he would rather be in slightly more auspicious conditions than a youth hostel in the middle of nowhere. Connor still wasn’t sure if Becker was gay or not, for pity’s sake.

 

            “Whatever it is, don’t worry about it,” Becker said pragmatically, going back to his book.

 

            Easier said than done, Connor thought, and turned his face to the wall and started to change into his pyjamas. He’d remembered a pair of pyjama bottoms, although they were crumpled and probably needed a wash, and he knew from experience that the soldiers wouldn’t notice if he changed in front of them, but sure as hell would notice if he sneaked off to change elsewhere. He was more or less immune to it, now, and it helped that he hadn’t really fancied any of them until Becker came along. Becker, who was Abby’s polar opposite physically, but shared a certain sort of reserve and toughness with Abby that Connor had always found a real turn-on.

 

            Connor dismissed these thoughts as quickly as he could and scuttled off to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

 

            When he got back several minutes later, having been forced to decline an invitation to join a literal pissing contest outside – there had been some snow earlier, a little of which had settled in the evening, and various people were keen on drawing shapes in the snow – Becker was still reading.

 

            “All right?” Becker said, looking up and bookmarking his place with a thumb.

 

            “Yeah, fine,” Connor said, restored to casualness. “You should probably know, the lads are about to go out and piss in the snow.”

 

            “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Becker groaned, swinging his legs off the bed and reaching for a pair of trousers. “Does Jacobs know?”

 

            “Dunno. It’s not the dorm he’s sleeping in.”

 

            “Have they got outside yet?”

 

            “No,” Connor said more confidently.

 

            “Well, I’ll go and see if they’ve managed to get anywhere, the silly sods. Christ, Jenny Lewis will kill us all if we get chucked out of here because somebody couldn’t keep their dick in their pants!”

 

            Connor did not return an answer, feeling that one wasn’t called for, and Becker stamped out of the room. He returned shortly afterwards, looking chilly and slightly grim, but satisfied.   

            “Carter and Finn had gone out,” he told Connor. “Stupid buggers. The rest were bright enough to stay indoors, and Carter and Finn won’t be trying that one again.”  


            “Good?” Connor hazarded.

 

            “Excellent,” Becker said, sounding like the cat with the cream. Connor wondered what he’d got in store for Carter and Finn that he sounded so pleased, and almost managed to distract himself by this thought from the fact that Becker had got into bed with him. “Right. I don’t know about you, but I’m knackered. Lights out?”

 

            “Lights out,” Connor agreed a little weakly, and turned off the light beside his side of the bed. Becker’s went off moments later, and then Connor was in bed, in the pitch black, with a man he fancied the pants off. He sent up a silent prayer that this wouldn’t backfire in his face, although that seemed unlikely.

 

             Five minutes later, a pair of cold feet touched his own, and he let out a yelp just from the shock of it.

 

            “Shit,” Becker said in the darkness. “Sorry.”

 

            “Your feet are freezing!”

 

            “They’ll warm up,” Becker said, eminently reasonably.

 

            “Oh my God,” Connor said, wanting to laugh despite himself.

 

            “Wishing you’d asked to room with Danny?” Becker said, and – was Connor going mad, or was that something vaguely hesitant in his voice?

 

            “I’ve shared with Danny before,” Connor said as casually as he could, heart beating as fast as a hummingbird’s. “He snores like a walrus.”

           

            “Oh, well, that’s fine.” Becker lapsed into silence for a moment, and then volunteered: “I don’t snore. But I do snuggle, sometimes. I’ll try not to.”

 

            “Okay,” Connor said, a little more high-pitched than usual, and screwed his eyes shut and tried to drive away all the images of Becker snuggling up to him in the night that had popped up in his brain.

 

            It didn’t work very well.


	9. Chapter 9

            “It feels so strange to be back here,” Sarah said happily, nibbling on a chocolate cupcake she’d kept back from dinner as she and Abby made their lazy way to Ravenclaw Tower.

 

            “Mm,” Abby said, rather less happily.

 

            “It’s hardly changed a bit.” Sarah popped the last of the cupcake into her mouth.

 

            “Except for being the site of a major battle,” Abby pointed out. She could still see the patches of stone where she’d scrubbed soot and blood out of the walls and floor; it had been healthier work than fighting during the war, and a welcome respite from being on the run. But it was very, very strange to be back, and not in the nostalgic sense that Sarah meant.

 

            Sarah glanced down at her, tucked her gloves more securely into the pockets of the coat loosely draped from her shoulder, and flicked her dark hair off her face before finally deciding on whatever it was she wanted to say. “Did you fight here?”

 

            “Um. Yes,” Abby said, not sure what else to say.

 

            “I didn’t know that,” Sarah said, soft and contemplative, and Abby was reminded of just how gentle she could be. How often the Dreamless Sleep in the bathroom cabinet was renewed by a more skilful brewer than her.

 

            “I don’t advertise it,” Abby said, rather at a loss. Here they passed a tapestry Abby had spent a fruitless afternoon trying to stick back to the wall, its denizens complaining the entire time; now they stared and whispered and pointedly ignored her. Here was a stained-glass window of Ceridwen the Enchantress Abby had pieced back together, here a suit of armour Abby had beaten the dents out of…

 

            Shoddy work, she thought absently, noticing that there were still quite a few dents – or perhaps that had been students, in the years since? She did not realise until Sarah spoke again that she had stopped to examine it, her face very pale and her eyes very wide in the armour’s gleaming surface.

 

            “The Americans say ‘thank you for your service’,” Sarah volunteered, and Abby turned to find Sarah watching her, her large dark eyes serious.

 

            Abby’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth for a moment. She freed it. “We’re not Americans,” she said at last.

 

            Sarah nodded slowly. “I always thought it was hollow, anyway.” She shrugged, and flicked her hair back over her shoulder again. “Maybe I should have come back to fight.”

 

            “You definitely shouldn’t have done,” Abby said, obscurely annoyed. “I’ve seen you try to duel.”

 

            “And you’re not here to make me feel better about my choices,” Sarah said easily, and grinned at Abby.

 

            Abby laughed, despite herself. “No.”

 

            At this auspicious moment, Caroline Steel fell out of a wall.

 

            “ _Petrificus Totalus_!” Abby shouted, wand flashing to her hand and incantation flashing to her mind before she’d registered more than a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye.

 

            “Shit,” Sarah said eventually, and they stared at Caroline’s face, fixed in a combination of surprise and profound irritation. “I thought she went down to the dungeons.”

 

            “Maybe I’m not the only one who isn’t jumping at the chance to relive her hallowed schooldays,” Abby suggested. “ _Finite incantatem_. I’m really sorry, Caroline.”

 

            “You have brilliant reflexes,” Caroline said grudgingly, allowing Sarah to help her off the floor and picking up her weekend bag. “And I didn’t mean to startle you. I forgot that that secret passage is sticky at this end.”

 

            Sarah’s face split in a broad, terrifying grin. “You know the Hogwarts secret passages? How many of them?”

 

            “A few,” Caroline demurred. “They come in useful.” She dusted herself off, and rearranged a few of her corkscrew curls, although Abby couldn’t see that they had ever been out of place. Then she grimaced, and her eyes flashed warily between Abby and Sarah. “I wanted to ask a favour.”

 

            “What sort of favour?” Abby said suspiciously.

 

            “Of course,” Sarah replied.

 

            The corner of Caroline’s perfect cupid’s bow mouth with its perfect pearl-pink lipstick twitched. “I wondered if you would let me into Ravenclaw Tower.”

 

            “We thought you were going to the Dungeon,” Sarah said carefully. Caroline had certainly taken her things there before dinner.

 

            Abby watched Caroline. She used to find her difficult to read, used to think the only story she showed in the lines of her body and face was the story she meant to project, but a year of duelling in the Athena Collective had made it clear that Caroline had tells, like any normal human being. She shifted her weight when nervous, she just disguised it as flirtation or vanity. Her face tightened, but she made it a secretive half-smile or wide-eyed innocence.

 

            “It’s cold down there,” Caroline said smoothly. “The lake has a chilling effect.”

 

            “Er,” Sarah said. “In my day, Ravenclaw Tower was bloody _freezing_ in winter. Some joker always left a window open because they wanted to do their Astronomy homework in the comfort of their own House, instead of going to Astronomy Tower like everyone else.”

 

            “Or because they were being a self-conscious twat about working so hard they didn’t feel the cold,” Abby agreed, eyes still on Caroline, who was now watching her back. “But we’re not self-conscious twats, and I think we can be counted on to shut windows.” She shrugged. “Are we going or not? I for one want a hot bath.”

 

            “Oh, yes please,” Sarah said, longingly. “And if we’ve been very good girls, somebody may just have forgotten their bubble bath.”

 

            “I hate to break it to you, Sarah, but I definitely haven’t been a good girl, lately or ever,” Caroline drawled, and smirked in that way that meant she was telling some kind of joke against herself. Abby sometimes wondered if she was doing it so other people wouldn’t tell the jokes themselves, and if that strategy worked for her. With a pang of shame, she realised that the attitude Caroline had just parodied was one Abby had taken seriously back when Caroline was sniffing around Connor, and that a year ago, she would have told those jokes about Caroline without a qualm.

 

            “High five,” Abby surprised herself by saying, and raised a hand. “Good girls are boring.”

 

            “This from the Ravenclaw,” Caroline retorted, but slapped her hand.

 

            “They said we were clever, not well-behaved,” Sarah pointed out, with a filthy grin and a wink. “Alternatively, I don’t suppose either of you was a prefect and can get hold of the password?”

 

            “That was a joke, right?” Abby said.

 

            “I lost out to Astoria bloody Greengrass,” Caroline said ruefully. “Merlin, I hated her for a bit there.”

 

            “Pity,” Sarah said. “The prefects’ bathroom is _amazing_.”

 

            “How do you know?” Abby demanded.

 

            “My girlfriend was clever _and_ well-behaved,” Sarah grinned, and they all laughed.

 

            Finally, they reached the spiral staircase and climbed it, and then they were face-to-face with the familiar chestnut door, the familiar eagle doorknob, and Abby felt electricity down her spine as the eagle spoke.

 

            “Without the sun, what is light?”

 

            “Er,” Caroline said.

 

            “Oh God,” Abby muttered, coming down to earth with a bump.

 

            “I hated these,” Sarah confessed.

 

            “I was hoping one of you would know the answer,” Caroline sighed.

 

            “If this doesn’t work, we’re going to Gryffindor,” Abby announced. “I don’t care if Ryan and Stephen are shagging, the girls’ dorms will be free.”

 

            “Shut up, I’m thinking,” Sarah said, frowning and chewing on one fingernail, and eventually she looked up and said: “Without the sun, we would never have known light. Light would be a non-existent concept.”

 

            “Presuming that humans even managed to evolve,” Abby added. “With no light for photosynthesis.”

 

            `They waited with bated breath for a moment, and then the door swung open.

 

            “Thank Morgana,” Caroline said, and there was a hurried charge over the threshold.

 

            “What’s photosynthesis?” Sarah asked. The door swung sharply shut behind them, as if it disapproved.

 

 

            At the end of the war, Abby had spent several months sleeping in Hufflepuff. Ravenclaw, like all of Hogwarts’ towers, had been badly damaged by the giants’ missiles during the Battle of Hogwarts, and Hufflepuff hardly touched. She had hardly ever gone back to Ravenclaw except in the company of Luna Lovegood, levitating cans of paint in her wake, and then it had been full of rubble and jagged glass, sweltering in the heat of that particularly warm summer. It was unrecognisable now, back to the deep blue sanctuary that Abby remembered, Rowena Ravenclaw’s statue serene in the centre. One of the house-elves had lit a fire in one of the grates and cast some heating charms, so the high ceilings weren’t so cold as they might have been, and the stars glittered through the immense windows’ diamond panes, almost friendly in their brightness. The lamps were softly lit, perfect for quiet study or falling asleep tidily in a squishy blue armchair with your textbooks scattered around you until some firstie accidentally set their Transfiguration homework on fire and had to be rescued by the nearest responsible human being.

 

            Abby felt like a first-year again, which perhaps explained why she led the group straight to the dorm that she had occupied throughout her time at Hogwarts, and dropped her bag at the foot of the bed where her trunk had always rested.

 

            “Oh, perfect,” Sarah said with genuine enthusiasm, and flopped face-first onto one of the beds. “This is lovely. I’m so glad we got the riddle right. Gryffindor quilts are inadequate.”

 

            Caroline made her way into the room more diffidently, and sidled over to the window. The heavy velvet drape that covered it had been pulled over; Caroline pulled it back a little, and glanced out. Abby knew what she would see; the lake, black in the midnight darkness, the moon glittering on its surface.

 

            “Pick a bed, any bed,” Abby said as matter-of-factly as she could, sitting on the side of her bed to pull her boots off. Whoever had slept here since she left had carved their initials into the bedside table.

 

            Caroline looked around as if startled.

 

            Abby raised her eyebrows at her. “Preferably not one that’s already got someone in it.”  


            Caroline smiled, and Sarah chuckled into her pillow before turning over onto her back. “Dibs on first bath,” she announced.

 

            “Sarah,” Caroline said patiently, finally setting her case down by the bed nearest the window. “We’re the only ones here. Surely there isn’t one bathroom for all the Ravenclaw girls?”

 

            “God no,” Abby said. “One on every floor. Look for the doors with the brass teardrops on.” She picked her bag up again, and went off to wash.

 

           

            When she got back, Caroline was sitting on the bed she had chosen, dressed in lemon-yellow pyjamas and wrapping her hair up in a silky, peridot-coloured scarf. The main light had been turned off, but all the bedside lights were on, casting a quiet glow. Abby remembered her Holyhead Harpies tracksuit bottoms and oversized t-shirt with a chameleon on it, and felt inadequate to the beauty of her surroundings. She dragged a comb through her hair and climbed into bed.

 

            “Where’s Sarah?”

 

            “Washing her hair,” Caroline said, tying a knot and tucking the scarf’s ends away. “Communing with the Ravenclaw hot water supply and somebody’s stolen bubble-bath.”

 

            Abby snorted with laughter.

 

            Caroline looked over, half-smiling, and Abby saw the moment her eyes fell on the chameleon on Abby’s torso. She flinched, and looked away as the smile dropped off her face, and Abby crossed her arms over the image.

 

            “Sorry,” she said, not sorry at all. “I didn’t think about your lizard phobia when I was packing. To be honest, if I’d remembered, I wouldn’t have changed my pyjamas.”

 

            Caroline said nothing for a long moment. Abby reached for the copy of Nature she had left in her bag, and settled down to ignore her. She hadn’t got past the index when Caroline spoke.

 

            “The Carrows spread a rumour that the D- Voldemort spoke to all reptiles, and they told him everything they saw,” she said, as carefully even as she had been the first day she’d reported to the anomaly project in the Ministry of Magic, and Abby had almost hexed her. “Not just snakes. We all knew he was a Parseltongue by that point, of course. You must have noticed, if you worked on the reconstruction – there were an abnormally large number of snakes and lizards about Hogwarts.”   

 

            Abby remembered something, and guilt swept over her. “The builders who’d been at Hogwarts during the battle tried to kill them. I used to rescue them.”

 

            “They were just animals,” Caroline said, eyes averted. She folded her hands as neatly as she might have done at Fleur Delacour’s dinner table, at the soiree Abby had refused to go to. “They didn’t hurt anyone.”

           

            “My flat must have seemed like hell,” Abby murmured, picking at the quilt’s edge.

 

            Caroline nodded. “You may be surprised to hear this, but Slytherin House? Contains a lot of depictions of snakes.”

 

            Abby giggled, and felt like a terrible person until she realised that Caroline was giggling too.

 

            “What did you do with your pets?” Caroline asked suddenly, when the laughter died away. “I wondered, when I realised you didn’t keep them at Sarah’s.”

 

            “Well, I…” Abby tucked her knees under her chin and thought. “I didn’t have to leave as suddenly as Stephen or Ryan, I had a couple of weeks to prepare. I knew I couldn’t take them with me, because I didn’t know where the hell I’d be going. I hadn’t… worked anything out, I just knew I had to leave. I didn’t have a job, or a home to go to, or anything. So I knew I had to find them new owners. Rex – the coelosauravus – he was easy, of course, Connor kept him and one of the snakes and one of the lizards, the ones he particularly liked. A few weren’t actually my pets, I was taking care of them for other people, so they went straight back to their owners. And the rest I re-homed through friends.” She shrugged. She missed them all, but… she’d had no choice, she’d done the responsible thing, she sometimes still got to see and handle a few of them if she visited the right friends. She missed Rex most of all, though.

 

            Caroline was silent for a minute. “I’m sorry you had to do that,” she said at last.

 

            Abby shrugged again. “It just is. Anyway, why are you sorry? You hated them.” Her last words contained a little more venom than she’d meant, remembering Rex and the fridge; duelling at the Athena Collective she’d taken out her feelings on Caroline often enough that it didn’t sting as much as it might once had done.

 

            Caroline winced. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry about Rex. I… I panicked.”

 

            “It’s okay,” Abby said grudgingly, and was surprised to find that she more or less meant it. “It was a shitty thing of you to do, but… Snakes and lizards. I get it, sort of. I’m not pissed off at you any more.” She sighed and ran her hands into her hair, making it stick up. “I still can’t say You-Know-Who’s name. The Taboo, you know? They put a Taboo on it so people who hated him and called him by his real name would get caught. I knew too many good people who got caught by that. Everybody has… stuff.”

 

            Caroline nodded. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

 

            A yawn crept up on Abby and took her by surprise. It was only ten o’clock, but she’d had perhaps four hours’ sleep in the last twenty-four. “I’m tired, I might…”

 

            “Yeah,” Caroline said. “Fair warning, Sarah’s going to bounce in here like a Labrador puppy wanting to play sleepover games and gossip.”

 

            “Circe’s knickers,” Abby moaned, a wave of exhaustion tiding over her. “ _No_. I’ll strangle her.”

 

            She closed the four-poster bed’s heavy blue curtains on the sound of Caroline’s laughter.

 

***

 

            Nick was woken by the sound of Jenny’s mobile ringing, and somebody knocking on the door. He untwisted himself from Jenny somewhat reluctantly – as usual, they had wound themselves around each other in the night – and went to answer the door, leaving Jenny to mutter unladylike curses and reach for her phone. He grabbed a pair of trousers on the way, just in case it was Jackie knocking.

 

            Connor was on the other side of the door, dressed in an assortment of clothes that was no more than usually odd considering it was, well, _Connor_ , and he had his pocket anomaly detector in one hand and two cups of coffee in the other.

 

            “The anomaly detector’s just started beeping, Professor,” he said politely, eyes fixed firmly on Nick’s face.

 

            Nick glanced down and realised that his fly was undone. He did it up, and relieved Connor of the cups of coffee.     

 

            “Ugh,” Jenny said in disgust. “Yes, Claudia just called me to say the same thing.”

 

            “It’s seven o’clock in the morning!” Connor yelped. “Is she at work?”

 

            “Not even my sister would be that silly,” Jenny said darkly, wrapping the blankets tightly around herself as she stood to fetch some clothes. Connor averted his eyes, blushing like a fire engine. “No, she has the technicians call her whenever it goes off, regardless of what time it is or who else is on duty.”

 

            “Claudia’s always been very dedicated,” Nick said, well aware of Jenny’s worries about her half-sister’s working habits, although he didn’t see as much wrong with them as she did. But Jenny claimed she had seen Lester work himself into the ground over the anomaly project, and she didn’t want to watch Claudia do the same. Nick supposed that Lester had been a very hard-working smug bastard.

 

            “Becker says downstairs in five?” Connor suggested rather tentatively, clearly trying very hard not to pay attention to Jenny dressing behind the door and cursing as articles of clothing eluded her.

 

            “We’ll be there, Connor,” Jenny assured him. “Just make sure they save some breakfast for us!”

 

            “Bacon sarnies,” Connor said enthusiastically.

 

            “Delicious,” Jenny said, and Nick took that as his cue to close the door gently in Connor’s face. He listened a moment for the sound of Connor tramping away like a small herd of rhinos, and turned to Jenny.

 

            “Becker says, does he?”

 

            Jenny smiled, running a brush through her tangled dark hair at light speed, making it crackle. “Shut up and get dressed, Nick.”

 

            “Have you put Connor and Becker in a room together, Jennifer Lewis?” Nick demanded, knowing he was grinning. He took his trousers off, added some boxers, and replaced the trousers, before going in search of socks.

 

            “They’re grown men,” Jenny said primly, tucking her brushed hair up into a chignon and applying the briefest slick of eyeliner. “They can cope.”

 

            Nick excavated his socks from his weekend bag, and then remembered something else – namely, that there had been four rooms left in the hostel after he and Jenny had taken the double. A double, two dorm rooms, and a single. Which meant…

 

            “Jenny, lass, have you put them in the same _bed_?”

 

            Jenny, now fully dressed and immaculate, brushed a kiss against his cheek. “As I said, Nick. They’re grown men, they can cope. And after all, they’re both half in love with each other.”

 

            “What?” Nick demanded, flummoxed, but not so flummoxed that he couldn’t put a sneaky arm around his partner’s waist and draw her closer. She was smirking up at him, lips pressed tightly together, dark eyes dancing wickedly.

 

            “Don’t make me repeat myself, Nicholas Cutter,” she chided, gave him a smacking kiss on the lips, and then slipped expertly out of his hold. “You know, it’s almost a pity we’ll be missing Claudia’s blasted office Christmas party because of this. I’d _love_ to see what Connor and Becker do faced with a room full of mistletoe and spiked punch.”

 

            Nick yanked his shirt over his head and pulled a jumper over the top. “You’re a wicked, wicked woman, Jenny Lewis.”

 

            “But you love it,” Jenny said reasonably, and left their room with her head held high, the image of propriety.


	10. Chapter 10

             “It’s nice to see them doing so well,” Stephen said, for lack of much else to say. In truth, he couldn’t see much of the Muggle anomaly team; the anomaly had been less than ten minutes’ walk from the Muggles, and by the time Lester had successfully contacted them to tell them that the ADD had picked up an anomaly and give them the coordinates, the others had already been there. The only way to see what was going on was from a broom twenty feet up in the air, Disillusioned and ready to zip out of sight should anyone realise anything was wrong, or the ARC team be forced to open fire.

 

            Ryan grunted dubiously, which Stephen felt was unfair, and messed with the straps of his flying gloves. Stephen knew Ryan hated them as he hated all gloves, but it was the middle of December in Scotland and it was freezing in the air. They were just lucky it hadn’t started snowing yet, the thin film of feeble snow that had been laid down late at night melting away with the morning’s weak sunlight.

 

            Stephen glanced up and back at the sky. He had suspicions of those heavy grey clouds building behind him.

 

            “They’re doing fine,” Abby said, circling slowly. She had borrowed a school broom – a very decent Cleansweep Four, since there was nobody else competing for the contents of the school broom shed – and seemed to be enjoying herself. Stephen didn’t remember her playing for Ravenclaw, didn’t remember her at all from Hogwarts, but she was several years younger than him and might have made the team after he’d left. She had certainly been relieved enough when Sarah had announced that she never flew anywhere except on a flying carpet, and would spend the day re-acquainting herself with Hogwarts library instead of coming with them, which would probably have meant their sharing a broom.

 

            “Becker, Connor and Danny are doing well,” Caroline mused, circling near Abby, but slightly lower. She was also using a school broom, but didn’t seem as at home on it as Abby did.

 

            Stephen looked down, and identified the group Caroline was talking about by Connor’s familiar badge-encrusted hat. He had formed a trio with the black-clad soldier Stephen identified as Becker, although it was difficult to tell when he could only see the top of Becker’s head, and somebody tall and rangy with a mop of ginger hair concealed under a repellent beanie, who must be Danny Quinn. The three of them had cornered two of the zippy two-legged little dinosaurs that had popped out of the anomaly and were trying to frighten them back into the anomaly by dint of waving coats and yelling. It was sort of working, although Connor had slipped and fallen on the slippery ground at least twice and was now liberally coated in mud; Becker seemed to manage to be there to pick him up again every time and the little dinosaurs weren’t aggressive. Part of Stephen was mentally flicking through his knowledge of theropods, based on the few details he could see from this height. If only he could get closer… He probably wouldn’t have long to work it out; they’d been up here half an hour, Stephen’s fingers were starting to sting at the ends, and the team had chased most of the little theropods back into the anomaly. They weren’t too keen to stay – Stephen guessed they didn’t have access to enough of their prey to really want to stay, because they’d been rooting up the soft mud of the hillside with the long, blunt claws on their forelimbs and didn’t seem to have come up with anything other than an unfortunate mole.

 

            “Not as well as Jenny and Nick,” Abby remarked, and let out a giggle.

 

            Stephen would rather not have looked at Nick, all things considered, but startled by Abby’s remark he did so. Nick and Jenny and a couple of the soldiers were standing around a stunned theropod lying on the ground, occasionally twitching feebly, and Jenny had her hands planted firmly on her hips and was giving vent to her feelings at sufficient volume that Stephen could catch snippets of what she was saying. Nick was laughing so hard he could hardly stand up, and Stephen couldn’t really see his face but he knew it would be crinkled up into one big bright smile. Stephen was surprised at himself when he only smiled, instead of wanting to cry, and Ryan flew a little closer, his grey eyes darting to Stephen’s.

 

            Stephen shook his head, and Ryan nodded almost infinitesimally and stayed where he was.

 

            “One of them tried to nip Jenny and she clocked it across the head with her handbag,” Abby said, laughing herself. That certainly explained the stunned theropod. Stephen had once chivalrously picked up Jenny’s handbag to help her and had nearly dropped it again, startled by the weight.

 

            “I didn’t think they were aggressive enough,” Stephen said, flying over a little closer to Jenny (and Nick, but Stephen was finding that easier to ignore with every anomaly, easier to pretend it wasn’t uncomfortable).

 

            “Well, they’re not, not really,” Abby said, joining him, and they hovered lower than any of the others, over the twitching theropod as Ditzy sedated it and Captain Jacobs ordered somebody to fetch a tarp. “They should have a proper vet, what are they _doing_?”

 

            “Making do,” Stephen said, trying to get a proper look at the theropod. It had started to rain slightly, so cold and biting Stephen thought it more like sleet, and he wanted to get close enough to give Sarah useful information before Ryan insisted on their returning to Hogwarts. “Hmm.”

 

            “Insectivore, I think,” Abby said softly, practically lying flat along her broom, head propped on her arms and squinting through the sleet. They were now so low that if they didn’t speak quietly the spells wouldn’t be enough to stop their Muggle former colleagues hearing them, and Stephen’s spine was prickling at the thought of Ditzy or Jacobs realising something funny was going on, or Nick choosing just this moment to be a little too good at looking at the wrong thing at the wrong time.

 

            Stephen nodded. “I’d say late Cretaceous,” he murmured. “It’s a feathered dinosaur, obviously… pretty small… with those claws, I think it has to be Mononykus.”

 

            Mononykus actually looked like the godforsaken offspring of a velociraptor, a buzzard, and a sparrow, but fortunately it was small and light and as delicate as the brown feathers that coated its skin, and the claws were blunt. It would have been almost pretty-looking, were it not for the bald, raw-looking red skin that covered its face, like a turkey’s wattles. Abby took out her phone and took a picture, and Stephen saw Ditzy twitch as if he’d felt rather than heard something, grabbed Abby’s wrist and rose into the air. Abby rose with him, looking as rattled as he felt, and Ryan flew over, frowning. His hair was wet with the sleet stinging Stephen’s face, water dripping down his neck and cheeks, but that didn’t make his scowl any less thunderous – or ultimately resigned.

 

            “Christ, Miss Maitland!”

 

            Abby winced. “I thought it would be fine.”

 

            Stephen looked down at the same time as Ryan, and saw that Ditzy had gone back to normal – in the course of chasing the last two hale and healthy Mononykus through the anomaly Connor had fallen over, been whipped across the chest by the dinosaur’s tail, and had promptly fallen full-length in the mud and twisted his ankle. Becker had picked him up again and was now holding him by the shoulders while Ditzy read him the riot act.

 

            “God knows I don’t miss that,” Ryan said, half to himself, as Nick, Captain Jacobs and two soldiers Stephen couldn’t recognise by their hair carried the unconscious Mononykus through the anomaly on a tarp. Ditzy was still issuing the riot act to Connor, who was now sitting on the bonnet of a car with a martyred expression, having his ankle probed.

 

            “Keeping Connor out of trouble or being scolded by Ditzy?” Stephen asked, almost without meaning to. Abby glanced between the two of them and zipped off to join Caroline, who was hovering over the anomaly itself, ten feet above it, and staring down into it, doubtless thinking Unspeakable-like thoughts. Stephen knew very little about the Department of Mysteries, but was fairly sure that Caroline hailed from the more _practical_ end, rather than the end that concerned itself with the great mysteries of the universe. Still, she probably knew or guessed a bit more about cutting-edge magical theory surrounding where the anomalies came from and why than he did.

 

            “Both,” Ryan said, but there was something in his face that even Stephen recognised as not quite…

 

            Well. Connor could be an irritating little sod when he didn’t mean to, but he’d been Stephen’s irritating little sod, the closest thing to a younger brother he’d ever had, and Stephen had been desperately sorry to leave him behind. Sometimes he thought he missed Connor more than he missed Cutter. And he knew that Ditzy and Ryan had been very close, had seen the fallout of Ryan’s supposed death in Ditzy’s eyes even as he sneaked out to visit Ryan in St Mungo’s.

 

            “Liar,” he said softly, but there was a smile in it.

 

            Ryan grinned. “Maybe.” A gust of wind, bringing fresh sleet, blasted into both their faces, and the anomaly team down below collected into a huddle and then separated again, most of the civilians returning to the cars. Stephen recognised the familiar signs of a guard being left for the anomaly.

 

            “- swear to God, Nick, if you refer to me as the Iron Lady _one more time_ –” floated up from below in Jenny’s irate tones, and Ryan and Stephen both laughed.

 

            “Weather’s getting worse,” Ryan noted. “I reckon it’s time most of us went – Miss Steel will come off her broom if it gets any windier.”

 

            Stephen glanced over at Caroline, who _was_ looking faintly grim, and nodded. He wheeled around and pulled off in the direction of the others, Reilly and Blade and company having gathered around Caroline where Abby was flying close enough to catch her if she did fall.

 

            “At least this one was outside Hogwarts’ wards,” Abby said as they touched down in the middle of the Quidditch pitch ten minutes later, short the two Aurors who had been left to watch the anomaly - and not, Stephen devoutly hoped, flick chewing gum at their counterparts and Vanish it before the Muggle soldiers could register anything other than something flying out of midair. “It can’t have disturbed them, right?”

 

            “I don’t think so,” Caroline said doubtfully. “We could ask Sarah? Wasn’t she planning on looking at the wards and the anomalies’ effect on them today?”  


            “Supposing she could lose that little twerp of a Hufflepuff,” Abby muttered, in reference to the kid who kept unsubtly shadowing Sarah through the library, apparently trying to work out what she was up to.

 

            Caroline’s nose wrinkled. “She could just _hex_ him.”

 

            “He’s only fifteen,” Abby said, but Stephen could see something in her face that strongly indicated that she agreed with Caroline that the Hufflepuff in question deserved a little hex. Abby sighed, combed her wet blonde fringe out of her face and turned to the others as the sleet intensified and they hurried up to the castle. “He’s a conspiracy theorist,” she explained. “You know who I mean – dark hair, tubby, glasses? He’s fascinated by the fact that we’re here.”

 

            “That’s not him, is it?” Ryan said, as they dropped off Abby, Caroline and Stephen’s brooms in the school broom-shed before going indoors. A small knot of students, all wearing House colours if not House uniform, watched them pass with owlish stares. One of them was a boy fitting Abby’s description.

 

            “Yep,” Abby said, popping the ‘p’, and glanced down at her watch. “It’s lunchtime, isn’t it?”

 

            “Better go and get Sarah,” Caroline said, taking the exit from the Great Hall that led to the library. “She’ll only forget to eat.”

 

            Abby hesitated visibly, and then called “Wait for me,” and followed Caroline.

 

            “Never thought I’d see the day those two would get on,” Stephen said to Ryan, wringing out his scarf. It dripped all over the stone-flagged floor, and he thought for a second that he’d need to get a mop before remembering that he was, in fact, a wizard and drying it up with a flick of his wand.

 

            “I think they’ve got more in common than they realised,” Ryan said pragmatically, wiping his boots. “I think Abby likes Caroline, when she forgets that she wants to hate her. Are you going straight into lunch? I’ve got to report to Lester, he’s breathing down mine and Caroline’s necks about Hogwarts security and I lost the toss with Caroline on who should report this one.”

 

            “I should probably take some notes on the Mononykus,” Stephen said. “Before I forget everything.” He heard a faint dripping noise, and realised the puddle from his wet scarf wasn’t the only one he’d left on the floor; he’d felt fine in the air, if not exactly warm, but he was soaked through and his coat and jeans were sopping wet. He just hoped Abby and Caroline dried themselves off before entering the library; Madam Pince was in her seventies now, but as vicious as ever. “And maybe I ought to get dry.”

 

             “Get out of those wet things,” Ryan said gravely, and Stephen looked into his grey eyes again and saw that faint curl to his wide mouth, that tiny change to his expression that Stephen was increasingly certain meant he was flirting.

 

            Stephen was not at all sure what to do with that, particularly considering that he and Ryan had a Gryffindor boys’ dorm to themselves; nobody had chosen to take the two spare beds. That might be because the Aurors just didn’t want to share a room with their commanding officer and an awkward civilian, or it might be because everyone on Lester’s anomaly project thought they were shagging. Stephen thought even Lester was reasonably sure they were… well, a thing, an item, even though so far it was just flirting that left Stephen breathless and wondering if he was overstating the case, Ryan closer to him every time he looked around. For a split second, Stephen wondered what would happen if the anomalies didn’t go, if Lester had to come up to Hogwarts – would Lyle come too? Would the four of them end up sharing a dorm? Would they have to listen to Lyle and Lester –

 

            _Christ_. He was staring into space turning red, Ryan was watching him with a slight quizzical tilt to his head, and he was getting all kinds of unwanted mental images involving his boss’s sex life. Stephen forcibly derailed his train of thought.

 

            “Penny for them,” Ryan said, starting to walk, and Stephen fell in with him automatically. Maybe that was one of the things that made people think they’d already fallen into bed with each other – that, the sort of ease between them that Stephen never noticed was easy until he compared it to being around other people, the way Ryan stood casually in his personal space, and had a smile just for him. But Ryan wasn’t coming any closer, and Stephen wasn’t sure quite how to step forward and close the distance between them, not after years of keeping a careful distance from Nick, who couldn’t know all sorts of things that Stephen had done and was still doing. Stephen wanted to close the distance, wanted to know what that smile tasted like, what it turned into if he took hold of Ryan’s hips, where the Muggle jeans Ryan wore when they needed to be in civvies hugged his arse.

 

            “Penny for them,” Ryan repeated, raising one sandy blond eyebrow enquiringly at Stephen.

 

            Stephen’s face went hot. “Nothing,” he said, and there was that curl to Ryan’s mouth again.

 

            “Cherry pie,” Ryan said to the portrait of the Fat Lady, which swung open and let them into the Gryffindor common room, and all Stephen could think was _I’m completely screwed, aren’t I_.  


	11. Chapter 11

            “Speak up,” Claudia said to her phone, which was lying flat on her desk on speakerphone. “I can’t hear you!”

 

            “It’s not my fault the signal’s dreadful,” Jenny said irritably, all the way from Scotland. “I don’t want to use Jackie and Douglas’s phone unless I have to.”

 

            “Well, fair enough, but…” Claudia cut herself off with a sigh, and tapped her pen on the glass top of her desk. Her eyes were watering from staring at a screen all day, and the fiercely white halogen light of the ARC was starting to get to her. Why the builders couldn’t have gone for something a little softer in the atrium, she’d never know. The rest of the ARC was practically set up for romantic mood lighting, the light was so carefully pitched – and although Claudia knew why, Lorraine had explained the reasons why everyone who had been in the ARC the day of Leek’s attempted coup needed their lights to be steady and calming, it still struck part of her as vaguely ridiculous that most of the building should be so well considered, and yet the lights in here were blinding. She really ought to do something about it.

 

            She had a sudden thought, and cut her eyes sideways to look at Lorraine Wickes, her head with its innumerable inky black braids bent to her work. How was she coping with the blinding lights?

 

            “But what?” Jenny demanded.

 

            “But nothing,” Claudia said, abruptly yanked back to the present. She needed a break of some description. “Tell me about the anomaly.”

 

            Jenny summarised an uneventful hour at an anomaly very close to the youth hostel they were staying in, which had disgorged a group of small, insectivorous theropods that mostly weren’t aggressive and generally didn’t mind being herded back through the anomaly, except for the one Jenny had hit with her handbag.

 

            “You – I’m sorry, Jenny, I can’t have heard you right. What did you do?”

 

            Jenny repeated herself, a distinct edge of annoyance to her tone, and in the background Claudia heard Nick chuckling.

 

            “Is the dinosaur all right?” Claudia asked, and Nick’s chuckling turned into a lot of male laughter from several different sources, swiftly followed by Jenny pointing out that if she could knock a dinosaur unconscious with her handbag, then she could certainly make any of them rue the day they’d been born. This produced a reduction in the volume level of laughter, but not an absolute cessation, which Claudia knew Jenny would have preferred.

 

            “Is your handbag all right?” Claudia asked.

 

            “Fine,” Jenny said grudgingly. “A little scuffed. Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

 

            “Good, because the ARC can’t afford to replace your accessories,” Claudia said. “We’ve had no more anomaly activity here, but you’re closer. Is Connor right about the portable detector working better to pick up small anomalies, or anomalies in weaker signal areas, close up?”

 

            There was some muttering. “He says that’s just a theory,” Jenny said cautiously when she came back on the line. “And he’s not sure. We haven’t had another anomaly here to test it with.”

 

            “Well, fingers crossed you won’t,” Claudia said practically, leaning back in her splendidly ergonomic leather chair, which creaked ominously. She sat up in a hurry; it had never done that when Lester leaned back in it, had simply accepted _force majeure_ and yielded, making him look smooth and relaxed and viciously efficient. “And fingers crossed that if you do, they’re all like today’s. Trouble-free.”

 

            “It was raining the whole time,” Jenny said, voice making plain just how unacceptable this was. Claudia thought of suggesting that she address her complaints to a higher power, and discarded the notion.

 

`          “Anyway,” Claudia said bracingly. “Have a nice rest of the day. Let me know if anything happens that isn’t an anomaly, and keep me informed if you have to take action, all right?”

 

            “Of course, Claudia. Try not to work yourself into the ground.”

 

            “Mm,” Claudia said ambiguously, and hung up immediately. She put her fingers to her temples and rubbed small circles there for a bit, then pinched her nose and stared into the empty space on the other side of the balcony outside her office. The atrium’s walls didn’t get any less grey, the glass didn’t get any less shiny, the lights didn’t glare any less, and Claudia’s headache didn’t disappear as she willed it to.

 

            She couldn’t _wait_ for Christmas and a few days off.

 

            She got up and went into Lorraine’s office. “Lorraine. I don’t know about you, but I could do with a break. It’s just that time of day, isn’t it?”

 

            Lorraine looked up at her, and there was a dull undertone to her skin that contrasted unpleasantly with her usual conker-bright glow of health and went alarmingly with the shadows under her eyes. Claudia thought it would be inappropriate to ask if she was getting enough sleep, but she certainly looked weary enough when she took off her reading glasses and sat back in her chair, rigid posture relaxing for a moment.

 

            “I’d love a coffee,” Lorraine admitted.

 

            “Well, it’s quiet with everyone off in Scotland,” Claudia said. “Why don’t we go down to the rec room and get a coffee and some biscuits? If we absolutely have to work, we can talk about the Christmas party.”

 

***

 

            “Give it another day,” Lyle remarked, checking his watch, “and they’ll be able to come home. Today was anomaly-free, wasn’t it?”

 

            Lester flopped into an armchair and dropped the keys to his flat on the floor, one well-kept hand resting over his face in an expression of elegant exhaustion. “Yes, it was. Splendid. More of Dr Hart and Captain Ryan’s patent brand of flirtation, and Miss Maitland and Miss Steel trying to decide if they want to kill each other or not.” He dropped his hand, and looked up at Lyle with weariness in his face. “I think I prefer them when they’re in Hogsmeade; it’s easier to keep them under control.”

 

            “Just think how much trouble they can get into without your guiding influence,” Lyle said cheerfully, descending on Lester for a kiss that muffled the rude noise Lester made in response to this. “I see you got Liz to clean up. Also that she left food.”

 

            Lester cracked an eyelid open and gave his flat a jaundiced look. Lyle thought it was much tidier than the last time he’d seen it, possibly because Liz had returned from visiting her friends and had immediately hosted them, including the pretty blonde Ravenclaw she had a picture of and a crush on. The broom had been tidied away, the roaring Gryffindor poster removed to a less sensitive locale, and several loads of washing of school clothes had been done.  There was also, as Lyle had just observed, some kind of chicken stew and mashed potato set aside for them. Why she’d cooked when Lyle was almost certain she was meant to be spending the evening at her mother’s and eating there was beyond Lyle, but he didn’t propose to call Lester’s attention to it; he’d only feel the need to do something about it, and he was stressed enough.

 

            “I’m sure the other shoe will drop soon enough,” Lester said, heaving himself out of his chair with Lyle’s assistance. Lyle took the opportunity to cop a feel. “ _Jon_. She probably wants a new broom, or something.”

 

            “That’s not fair.” Lyle put an arm around his partner’s waist, and felt Lester lean into him.

 

            “I know,” Lester sighed. “She’s not a mercenary child, I just... Never mind.”

 

            “If you’re this badly allergic to Hit Wizards,” Lyle said, in reference to the branch of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement Lester had spent an interminable day wrangling with, “I’m going to ban them from the new headquarters.”

 

            “Be my guest,” Lester said into the shoulder of Lyle’s uniform coat. “Oh, god, they’re just so bloody _small-minded_. I honestly think I would rather be in Scotland explaining myself to Minerva McGonagall than thrashing out precedence with nasty little men who couldn’t hack the Aurors and wish they could. Death by McGonagall would be a great deal quicker than death by boredom and testosterone poisoning.”

 

            “Look on the bright side,” Lyle said soothingly. “The team will be back soon, and then the Hit Wizards will suddenly seem like model colleagues.”

 

            Lester groaned and peeled himself away from Lyle, loosening his tie. “I just hope these anomalies peter out soon. The ones at Hogwarts, I mean. They might be short-lived, quiet anomalies thus far, but they’re doing a number on my nerves.”

 

            “I know what you meant.” Lyle sighed himself. “Look, you’re shattered, I’m shattered, re-heating stuff is effort. Go and have a shower and I’ll call in some takeaway.”

 

            Lester brightened a little. “Every now and then, my cherub, you have a brilliant idea.” He smiled at Lyle. “I can only improve on this one in one aspect.”

 

            Lyle’s eyebrow twitched. “Oh yes?”

 

            Lester smirked and rolled his silk tie into a neat coil. “I’m not getting into that shower until you come and join me.”

 

            “Strategy,” Lyle grinned, stealing a kiss before going in search of the takeaway menus. “I like it.”

             

***

             

            Stephen woke in the grey pre-dawn, not quite sure what had roused him. He blinked, clearing sleep from his eyes, and stared up at the top of his four-poster bed, the thick red velvet curtains. For a moment, he felt like a child again, a thirteen-year-old boy at Hogwarts still lost in the wonder of the wizarding world, and then his brain kicked into gear and he remembered that he was, in fact, thirty-two and so completely different from the Gryffindor he’d been that his classmates probably wouldn’t recognise him.

 

            He turned over under the counterpane and closed his eyes, contemplated going back to sleep for a moment. He couldn’t hear anything from the other occupied bed in the room, which was Ryan’s; like most of the dorms, this one contained four beds, but the other soldiers had all banded together in little groups that had picked out rooms to share, and none of them seemed to want to share with Stephen and Ryan. Stephen sighed, and hoped his crush on Ryan wasn’t that obvious. Not that they were doing anything, for fuck’s sake – Ryan was still just out of his grasp, almost but not quite flirtatious, and in any case, the four-posters effectively concealed them from each other throughout the time they’d spent in the dorm. Which was only two nights, for the love of God, and unless there was an anomaly in the next day or so, they’d only have one more night here. Sleeping in the same room. In different beds. Awkwardly not talking to each other.

 

            Well, Stephen felt awkward, Ryan seemed calm and collected as ever.

 

            He flopped onto his back and let out a short sigh; sleep seemed miles away, and he thought he might get up for a second, for a glass of water, maybe, or just to go and sit down in the common room for a little. He pushed the curtain aside and slid out of bed, hissing as his feet touched the cold floor, and then freezing as he realised he wasn’t the only one up. Ryan was standing by the window, one hand on the stone casement, and his head had turned to stare at Stephen. Like Stephen, he was wearing a pair of boxers – Stephen seriously disapproved of the notion of bumping into Ryan or any of the other soldiers without clothes on, at least, not if it were an accident - but nothing else.

 

            There was a long moment of silence, and then Ryan said quietly: “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I’d woken you.”

 

            Stephen took this as his cue to slide fully out of bed and join Ryan by the window, scrubbing a hand through his short dark hair so that it stuck right up. “Don’t worry. I don’t know what woke me, but – Is something wrong?”

 

            Ryan’s mouth twisted, and he turned to stare out of the window. Reflexively, Stephen admired his profile, the moonlight on his chest and shoulders, gleaming off the silvery scars from the gorgonopsid.

 

            “I don’t know,” Ryan said at last. “I thought…” His free hand flexed, and he frowned. “I don’t know.”

 

            Stephen glanced out of the window, over his shoulder. The Quidditch pitch lay stretched out before them, silent in the crisply glittering air as frost formed, icing up the slushy ground. A quick look at his watch told Stephen it was three in the morning.

 

            “We should go back to bed,” he said.

 

            “Yeah,” Ryan said, and turned, and that brought him face to face with Stephen and far too close.

 

            Stephen stood very, very still, hyper-aware of Ryan’s presence.

 

            “Yeah,” Ryan repeated, and a tiny smile was curving his lips. “We should.”

 

            But he didn’t move, and when Stephen took his courage in both hands and edged a little closer, his smile widened. Stephen leant forward a touch, feeling stupid, feeling callow, like that thirteen-year-old not sure how to cope with people, and then finally bit the bullet and kissed Ryan, light and brief, but Ryan’s lips parted under his and Ryan’s hands settled on his waist, warm and broad-palmed, and Stephen stopped feeling stupid or callow or thoughtless as Ryan kissed him back.

 

            “You’re over Cutter, then?” Ryan murmured, into the half an inch between them.

 

            “Yes,” Stephen breathed without hesitation, and went in for another kiss, which he got.

 

            “Good,” Ryan said, nipping at Stephen’s lower lip. “Because I’ve been waiting long enough.”

 

 

            The other shoe dropped at breakfast the next morning, when Professor Flitwick hurried into the Great Hall looking positively perturbed, and made straight for Professor McGonagall. Abby’s head lifted as she caught sight of him – he was moving faster than she’d seen him go since the Battle of Hogwarts, she would have thought him too old to move at that clip – and she started to pay attention to something other than her breakfast, which was why she heard Professor Flitwick say: “Minerva, there’s another one of those anomalies, and it’s practically on top of the eastern ward anchor point.”

 

            Stephen, who had just told Abby that something he hadn’t been able to identify had woken both him and Ryan at three o’clock in the morning – Abby had politely not referred to mutual lust, but thought her eyebrows had done the mentioning for her - dropped his fork. Caroline rolled her eyes and audibly thanked Merlin that none of the students currently present at Hogwarts were down for breakfast yet.

 

            Ryan knocked back his coffee and stood decisively. “With your permission, headmistress, I think we’ll go straight down there.”

 

            “I think you’d better,” Professor McGonagall said. “Of course, let us know if you require assistance.”

 

            “Certainly,” Caroline said with her trademark dazzling smile, getting to her feet; Abby joined her, and Sarah bolted the last of her toast and got up too.

 

            “I’d better come down as well, then I can see the nature of the actual disturbance, contextualise it with my reading.”

 

            “Put some proper boots on,” Abby advised. Sarah’s over-the-knee Muggle boots were very fetching, but they wouldn’t stand up to tramping over the frosted mud that much of Hogwarts’ grounds consisted of at the moment.

 

            Sarah pulled a face. “Fine,” she said, and Ryan sent one of the Aurors with her, back to Ravenclaw Tower. Caroline, Abby and Stephen, all already dressed for the field, went out into the Great Hall, through the immense doors, and down the steps outside. Everything was glittering, weak winter sunlight gleaming off the snow and ice, and Abby couldn’t pick out an anomaly in among the glare. She tugged her hat further down over her head, and shaded her eyes to try to see further.

 

            They walked around the castle towards the eastern half of the grounds, past the Quidditch pitch, and as the angle of the sun changed relative to them they were able to see more. Still, Abby couldn’t pick out an anomaly, not when they walked right up to the eastern wall, a deceptively harmless-looking drystone creation, and Professor Flitwick murmured some words and waved his wand in a complicated curlicue, before hopping over the wall. Ryan followed him, and Abby, Stephen and Caroline came after, pursued by Aurors who attempted to fan out behind them as usual and found out the hard way that whatever Professor Flitwick had done had created a gap in some very serious wards. This minor disturbance dealt with, the team found themselves on the other side of the wall and staring at the anomaly, glittering shards of disaster dancing and whirling just ahead of them, before a clump of old and twisted trees on which no snow had settled.

 

            “That,” Professor Flitwick said, pointing at the tree, “is where the anchor point lies. _That_ , I assume, is the phenomenon you came here to study, Dr Page.”

 

            “ _Yes_ ,” Sarah said, eyes gleaming as she drew her wand.

 

            “Uh,” Stephen said, eyeing the wand askance. “Let us see what’s on the other side first, before you start casting spells on it.”

 

            “Diagnostics!”

 

            “ _Spells_ , Sarah.” Stephen shook his head, glanced at Captain Ryan, and the two of them stepped forward into the light. And wasn’t it funny, how the two of them were acting in concert more than ever; wasn’t it funny, how they invaded each other’s personal space even more than Abby had been accustomed to see?

 

            Abby said nothing and focussed on the anomaly, her own wand already out as she waited for Stephen and Ryan to return and the Aurors fanned out around the anomaly, Blade carefully shunting Professor Flitwick and Sarah to the side where they could discuss the whys and wherefores of anomalies without being in anyone’s line of fire. Flakes of snow drifted down from a quiet sky, and Abby wondered how long they had before the Muggle anomaly team arrived. Caroline claimed that Lester had contacted Captain Becker and found out where the Muggle team was, and it was only twenty minutes or so away. Becker was a Squib, apparently, and distinctly pissed off about magical meddling with the ARC; Abby approved, thinking that she trusted someone that distrustful to watch over Connor in her absence. Then again, the signal was so bad here, the anomaly detector might not have picked it up properly, and the roads would be icy…

 

            Abby’s fingers were cold; she shared a glance with Caroline, who was biting her lower lip, and her grip tightened a little more on her wand with every second Stephen and Ryan were gone.

 

            Finally, they reappeared, soaking wet to the knees but otherwise unhurt.

 

            “Deep snow out there,” Stephen remarked. “It looks like the Holocene.” He grinned like a child on Christmas Day. “I think there’s a Roman encampment out there, and there was a building site off to the south, like they were building a fort.”

 

            Sarah was at Abby’s elbow before Stephen could even finish his sentence. “I should go through, if there are people attested in the archaeological record –”

 

            “Steady on,” Caroline began, and then there was a rustling from the clump of trees and at least four people shouted ‘ _Stupefy_!’, Abby and Caroline among them. There was a very loud thump.

 

            “Verify your bloody fucking targets!” Ryan said crossly. “That could have been a badger!”

 

            “I _don’t_ think so,” Professor Flitwick said gently, squinting at Ryan. Abby reflected that when you’d been the reigning duelling champion of Berlin for nearly fifty years, being told your business by an Auror a third of your age probably didn’t go down very well. Then again, Ryan preferred not to be cheeked by the civilians in his care either, and Abby couldn’t imagine that even Ryan’s old Charms teacher would get away with that.

 

            “Ever met a badger in a helmet?” Caroline demanded; she had a better view from where she stood, and pointed at the place where something had fallen. “That’s not a bloody badger, Ryan.”

 

            Abby had not seen more than a flash of movement and red that shouldn’t have been. She rubbed a hand over her face, considered the possibility that she ought to attend therapy, and glanced at Ryan before jerking her head towards the wood.

 

            “No,” Ryan said, clearly irritated by the insubordination and determined to do things by the book. “Reilly, Fizz, go and check it out.”

 

            Sergeant Reilly and one of the junior Aurors tramped over to the clump of trees, and temporarily disappeared from Abby’s view; Abby heard Sergeant Reilly say “ _Mobilicorpus_ ,” in her Firewhiskey-cracked voice, and the two of them reappeared, levitating an unconscious Roman soldier between them.

 

            “Morgana’s tits, this is _fantastic_ ,” Sarah hissed, and then darted a guilty glance at Professor Flitwick. “Sorry, Professor.”

 

            “Not at all,” Professor Flitwick said, eyes gleaming with excitement. “Merlin’s beard, I’ve never seen anything quite like this before.”

 

            Abby forbore from saying that that wasn’t surprising, the remains of respect for her Head of House restraining her, and left Sarah and Professor Flitwick to get really over-excited about Romans and anomalies while she stepped forward to join Caroline and Stephen, who were already bent over the Roman’s unconscious body, now lying flat on the floor. Ryan was giving low-voiced instructions to watch the anomaly carefully, presumably in case the soldier’s friends decided he’d been gone too long and came looking for him, and then he moved to shadow Stephen, as usual.


	12. Chapter 12

            Abby stared down at the man she’d Stunned. He was perhaps in his mid-thirties, of average height, stocky and a little bow-legged with a broad brown face with high cheekbones under his close-fitting helmet; he looked pleasant enough and quite surprised. She winced. He held a long wooden staff in one hand and a short, broad-bladed knife in the other; he had a sword at his belt as well, currently sheathed and digging into the frosty ground. He was dressed in clothes that Abby didn’t recognise from her childhood history lessons on the Romans, before she’d gone to Hogwarts and dropped out of a Muggle understanding of history entirely; she was positive no picture of a Roman she’d ever seen had worn loose trousers or heavy leather shoes instead of sandals, and the red tunics she remembered seeing had short sleeves, and were brighter. She also recalled segmented armour and fancy helmets with large red crests and cheek plates, a far cry from the mail and relatively simple helmet this man wore, although the helmet did have remarkably silly stiff brown plumes. The mail had ornaments welded to it; they reminded Abby of a sort of immovable medal.

 

            “Ooh, an optio,” Sarah said, edging closer. “But that doesn’t look like any hastile I’ve ever seen before, it’s too well cared for. I wonder if it’s a sort of Roman wand? There are recorded cases of –”

 

            Caroline gave Abby a profoundly harassed look. “Sarah, speak English.”

 

            “Optios were a sort of lieutenant,” Sarah said. “One notch below a centurion. Hastiles were the staffs they carried.” She pointed at the ornaments. “This one looks like he’s been in service decades.”

 

            “Poor bugger,” Ryan said, with more sympathy than the average dinosaur got from him. “But what the hell’s he doing this far from Hadrian’s Wall?”

 

            “I’m not sure,” Sarah said uncertainly. “By the sword, I’d say he was later Roman. I mean, it looks longer than the earlier examples, and that’s – look, my specialty is Ancient Egyptians, my knowledge of Romans is a bit… incidental.” She scraped her teeth over her lower lip, and finally volunteered: “I think there was a later Roman incursion into the Highlands?”

 

            “There’s certainly the remains of a Roman fort only a few miles south,” Professor Flitwick piped up, causing the anomaly team to stare at him. “It’s hardly more than a few dents in the ground, now. The Muggles haven’t got at it yet. But there’s the odd Latin-speaking ghost around there, though the accent really has to be _heard_ to be believed.” He shook his head, and the anomaly team went from staring at him to staring at each other in mute semi-comprehension.

 

            “Great,” Caroline said at last, displaying her usual gift for dispensing with confusion. Abby, swimming helplessly in optios and staffs and forts, wished for a nice easy raptor to Petrify – or hit with a handbag, if she took Jenny’s way out and had one to hand. “So here we have a stray Roman, probably reasonably important as Romans go, definitely armed and dangerous and possibly a wizard, and over there we have a fort full of Romans who we definitely don’t want to unleash on the surrounding countryside. What do we do now?”

 

            “Put him back?” Abby suggested.   

 

            “Without waking him?”

 

            Abby shrugged helplessly. “How long does it take to recover from a couple of Stunners?”

 

            They all looked doubtfully down at the soldier and then back at each other.

 

            “Too long,” Ryan said eventually. “We don’t want his mates coming through because they want to know what knocked him on the head.”

 

            “Professor Flitwick, do you speak Latin?” Stephen asked.

 

            “I do, Dr Hart.” Professor Flitwick twinkled gently. “And so, I suspect, does Dr Page – if she gained her doctorate at a wizarding institution. I was wondering when you were going to ask.”

 

            Abby felt suddenly, unaccountably stupid, despite the fact that nobody sane had spoken Latin for centuries, and shuffled her feet slightly. She caught Blade’s eye and saw him grimace faintly, and knew that he, too, had immediately gone back to eight years of Professor Flitwick’s gentle reproofs to erring Ravenclaws.

 

            “Better wake him up, then,” Stephen said, directing his remark to Rees the medic, who had come forward as soon as the Roman was brought out unconscious. “Ready to start speaking Latin, Sarah, Professor Flitwick?”

 

            Both academics murmured agreements. Rees nodded, crouched down by the Roman’s head, and checked his pulse before peeling back one eyelid. Then he nodded again, apparently satisfied, and pointed his wand at the man’s chest. “ _Enervate_.”

 

            The Roman coughed and snorted, his eyeballs rolling under his thin eyelids, and then he opened his eyes; Abby could see the second that he realised he was among strangers, when he tensed and went rigid on the floor. Rees scuttled backwards until he was far enough from his patient that the Roman couldn’t just stab him.

 

            “Er,” Sarah said, and then something quick and incomprehensible in Latin.

 

            The Roman stared at her, but he made no move towards the knife that now lay just within his grasp, where it had fallen when he was lowered to the ground and his hand relaxed.

 

            There was an unexpected beep, which made the Roman twitch and Caroline jump. Abby looked at her, surprised. “Is that your mobile? Does it work out here?”

 

            “I didn’t think it would,” Caroline said, pulling the offending item from her pocket and frowning at it. “The prototypes for batteries that don’t die when you take them somewhere magical are good, but they’re not that good – I thought it would survive, but… and how do I have _signal_ up here?”

 

            Professor Flitwick clicked his tongue. “The damage to the wards…”

 

            “Probably pretty extensive,” Sarah said, and frowned. “If I could just run some –”

 

            “Operational concerns, Sarah,” Stephen said, eyes on the Roman, who looked seriously unnerved. “Not while we’ve got a load of Romans about to descend on us any minute now.”

 

            “ _Balls_ ,” Caroline said very loudly. The Roman, who evidently understood the tone if not the word, raised both eyebrows. Ryan eyeballed him, and he settled down, evidently understanding that, too.

 

            “Sorry?” Abby said, turning to look at Caroline, who was now tapping furiously away at her phone, which looked to Abby like a cannibalised Blackberry.

 

            “Lester told Becker to text me if the team left the hostel they’re staying in to go to an anomaly,” Caroline said, worry in her voice. “He just has. We’ve got twenty minutes before they get here.”

 

            “Shit,” Stephen said, and in the background Sarah was explaining the complicated history of the anomaly project to Professor Flitwick. She was getting some of it wrong, but Abby couldn’t be bothered to correct her under the circumstances. “Sarah! Get this guy to tell us who he is and what he’s doing here!”

 

            Sarah came forward again and tried some slower, more carefully enunciated Lati.: Abby listened without understanding, but saw the comprehension in the Roman’s eyes as he sat up and answered Sarah.

 

            “He says he’s an optio,” Sarah reported. “Like a lieutenant, or a sergeant, maybe. His name is Achaicus. He’s guarding engineers who are building a fort, he stepped aside to go to the bog and found himself here, and he wants to know who we are and what’s with the sticks.” She coughed. “I paraphrase. Obviously.”

 

            “Tell him… oh Merlin, just tell him the truth,” Caroline sighed, stuffing her Blackberry back into her pocket. “We can do magic and we guard this –” she waved one exasperated hand in the direction of the anomaly – “ _thing_. And somebody think of something impressive to do, I was never very good at Charms – sorry, Professor – and I can’t see anything spare to transfigure.”

 

            Abby raised her wand, causing Achaicus to flinch. “ _Avis_ ,” she said, remembering the charm that had earned her an E on her Charms OWL, and the inevitable flock of ephemeral canary-yellow birds burst from her wand and darted about her head, circling it on non-existent thermals.

 

            Achaicus’s jaw dropped, for which Abby really couldn’t blame him.

 

            “ _Finite incantatem_ ,” Abby added, after a long silent moment, and the birds faded from view. For good measure, Abby flipped her wand end over end before sliding it back into the holster at her wrist, a smooth showy move she’d spent far too much time practising as a girl that was made more impressive by the trail of purple sparks that left her wand as it flipped. Achaicus made some kind of warding sign with his fingers, but he didn’t lift the wooden staff, and he didn’t draw any kind of wand or come out with any sort of cantrip, so Abby thought she could safely assume he wasn’t a wizard.

 

            “Nice one,” Caroline said approvingly. “I think that did the trick. Sarah?”

 

            Sarah spoke again in Latin, and they all waited patiently while she conversed with Achaicus, who was quite clearly trying hard not to panic, and whose fingers were twitching towards his knife; he seemed deferential, but it was a forced sort of deference. Professor Flitwick listened closely, frowning a little and nodding occasionally.

 

            “He seems to think we’re some sort of deities,” Sarah said, and rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out when one of the Aurors mumbled something about sex gods and got a stinker of a glare from Ryan. “The peanut gallery can just shut up. Anyway, he wants to go home. It took him about five minutes just to get around to saying that.”

 

            Reminded of the Muggle team’s approach, Abby checked her watch. “We’ve only got ten minutes before the Muggles turn up, Sarah.”

 

            Sarah grimaced. “I think we should get him to promise that he’ll turn back anyone who tries to go through the anomaly. He seems pretty influential, and he’s got a high opinion of the common sense of most of his commanders. The Muggles don’t have any Latin speakers, do they?”

 

            She looked enquiringly at Stephen, who shrugged helplessly. “Connor definitely doesn’t, Cutter definitely doesn’t, I don’t know anything about Jenny’s qualifications but I doubt she studied Latin… look, Sarah, normal people don’t speak Latin.”

 

            “So the more convincing we can be in getting them to stay on their side of the anomaly, the better,” Sarah concluded, flicking her loose hair over her shoulder and tugging her woolly beret down further. “Caroline, what do I tell him?”

 

            Caroline bit her lower lip again and thought for a second. “The truth,” she said again. “Tell him that we guard this place, but not all the time; there’s another group of guardians who take our place soon, and they’re not as nice as we are. Tell him he was lucky to be found by us, and if anyone else comes through, there’ll be bloodshed and we won’t be able to protect them from it. Look harmless and kind, make him think you’re on his side. Everyone else, look upstanding and wholesome.”

           

            There was a brief silence, in which Stephen looked faintly stunned, Ryan looked approving, and Abby wasn’t sure what she felt other than admiration and a pressing awareness that they now had only about five minutes until their Muggle counterparts turned up. Professor Flitwick looked resigned to the fact that adults he had taught their first Charms as children grew up into vicious little sods, but then again, he’d fought in at least two wars – three, if the rumours about his work on the Continent during Grindelwald’s war were true. He’d probably seen a lot of children grow up into vicious little sods.

 

            “You’re either a genius or a psychopath,” Sarah said eventually, and grinned. “And I love it.”

 

            Caroline shrugged and smiled crookedly, a little defensive. “You do four years as an Unspeakable and see what it does for your concept of honesty. Hurry up, Sarah, we haven’t got time for ethical qualms.”

 

            Sarah nodded and turned back to Achaicus, who was eyeing them all warily and looked as if he’d quite like to make a break for it, but was also very obviously aware that a large number of armed men and women with powers he didn’t understand would act to stop him if he did try to escape. Sarah started to talk to him, her tone sweet and confiding, and Achaicus’s attention snapped to her.

 

            Caroline’s phone beeped again when Sarah had been talking solidly for a few minutes, and she swore at it.

 

            “What?” Abby hissed, and Caroline showed her the screen of the phone.

 

            _Get out of the way_ , it read. _We’re nearly there._

 

            “Fuck,” Abby muttered, and wondered if she ought to tell Sarah to get a move on, but then Sarah was demanding something of Achaicus, and Achaicus was nodding and raising his empty right hand in a half-open fist, with his middle and index fingers upright and thumb extended, and saying something that sounded like a promise.

 

              Sarah nodded and stood from where she’d crouched to talk to Achaicus on a level. “He’s just sworn on Roma Dea to go through, not come back, and bar anyone else from coming through.”

 

            “Roma what?” Stephen demanded, as Professor Flitwick turned away to raise the damaged wards again.

 

            “Personification of the empire,” Sarah said, Rees escorting her through the raised wards as firmly as Ryan was ushering Achaicus through the anomaly. Abby could hear engines close by, and she pulled out her wand again, feeling herself tense.

 

            “Everybody back in,” Ryan said, turning to chase everyone through the hole in the wards, and Abby duly went.

 

            “Will they hold?” she said to Professor Flitwick when everyone was safely on the other side and the wards had fallen again, worried for a second. “I mean, will the Muggles be able to see the castle?”

 

            Professor Flitwick was twirling his wand and muttering incantations, but he found the time and breath to shake his head. “Perhaps for a few moments, out of the corner of their eyes, but the enchantments will mean they won’t believe what they’re seeing.”

 

            “One of the people who’s coming is a Squib,” Caroline volunteered. “Will that change anything?”

 

            “He, or she, will be able to see the castle.” Professor Flitwick accomplished a particularly elaborate twirl. “I trust they’re discreet.”

 

            “Very,” Caroline said absently, staring into the distance; Abby looked in the same direction, and saw moving figures heading purposefully towards the anomaly. She could pick out the terrible red and yellow scarf Connor wore in bad weather from here, as well as the silhouette of that unspeakable hat, and suppressed the urge to flee.

 

            “Let’s go,” she said, ruthlessly controlling her voice and keeping herself still. “Unless we can help you, Professor?”

 

            “I’m fine,” Professor Flitwick said serenely. “But if you could report to Professor McGonagall as soon as possible when you return to the castle, that would be much appreciated. Tell her that Hogwarts remains secure and I anticipate no lasting damage to the wards, provided action is taken in a reasonably prompt fashion.”

 

            “Of course,” Abby said, and joined Ryan, Sarah, Stephen and about half the Aurors a little way away, shadowed by the remaining Aurors, who had stuck close to Caroline and Abby. Ryan nodded at one of them and jerked his head towards Professor Flitwick, and that Auror stopped and moved back to stand at a respectable distance from Professor Flitwick’s spell-casting arm.

 

            “Fingers crossed that was the last one in the cluster and we can go home soon,” Caroline sighed, as they walked back up to the castle. “I’m getting really tired of these near misses.”

           

            “Those won’t stop unless the Statute of Secrecy falls or somebody’s funding gets cut beyond all repair,” Stephen pointed out as they passed the Quidditch pitch.

 

            “Until,” Caroline said, stuffing her hands into her pockets. “Until, not unless.”

           

            Stephen looked at Abby with raised eyebrows, and Abby shrugged. She wasn’t going to pick fights with Caroline’s judgement over that one. She turned her head as they passed the stands, and looked back at the anomaly by the faintly-visible boundary line: clouds had half-covered the sun, reducing the glare, so Abby could just about see the anomaly’s glitter if she squinted and remembered where it was, and she could pick out the figures of Professor Flitwick and the Auror who had been left with him, just in case. Beyond the boundary wall, she could see the anomaly team. She could hardly pick them out at this distance, but there they were, almost within reach.

 

            Abby waved.

 

***

 

            “ _Optio_!” Dion bawled, knowing from experience that this ought to bring his optio running. “Achaicus! Achaicus, you idiot, where –”

 

            “Here, centurion,” Achaicus said, stepping out from a stand of trees. He looked distinctly shaken.

 

            Dion stopped and stared. “What’s the matter with you? I thought you went for a piss! You’ve been gone half an hour and our sainted commander’s convinced the Picts have got you!”

 

            “Not Picts,” Achaicus said heavily. “The gods.”

 

            Dion stared at him some more, and opened and closed his mouth in the vague belief that words might come out, and they might even make sense. They did not. “Jupiter’s balls, Achaicus, what is _wrong_ with you? This is a very bad time to catch piety.”

 

            “Look,” Achaicus said, and pointed at something just out of Dion’s sight.

 

            Dion shook his head and muttered, red crest shaking with his movements, but moved until he could see what Achaicus could; Achaicus was and always had been one of the most reliable soldiers he knew, and was a gift as an optio, and if he was convinced the gods had got at him then Dion ought to pay some bloody attention to his convictions. Finally, Dion saw what Achaicus was seeing, and he recoiled.

 

            “Roma Dea!”

 

            Regardless of Dion’s oaths, the ball of light in the air spun on, shining like the broken glass of the commander’s goblet, when he’d dropped it in the midst of a drunken dinner party and sulked that he’d have to go all the way back to Londinium to get a suitable replacement.

 

            “I went through by accident,” Achaicus said. “Didn’t see it in the snow glare. There was some kind of bloody big stone building, a complete wreck, on the other side, but there wasn’t anyone around so I took a piss and I was hardly done when this bunch of men and women turned up and knocked me out cold.” He waved helplessly. “They’ve got some kind of sticks, and they use them to channel – well. Magic. They must be gods. This little blonde girl produced a bunch of birds from thin air, Dion. Birds. And that’s not the worst bit – they told me they guard this, when it’s here, but they’re not the only ones and _the others are worse_. If anyone goes through, they’ll die.”

 

            Dion stared at Achaicus for a minute, and was forced to the regrettable conclusion that he was serious. “Achaicus. Are you sure?” He leaned forward and sniffed the air, but couldn’t pick up any scent of alcohol, and anyway, Achaicus wasn’t the type to be drinking on duty – let alone the repellent moonshine the cohort surgeon thought Dion didn’t know he brewed, and which was the only drink Achaicus could easily have got his hands on.

 

            “Certain,” Achaicus said grimly, grip tightening on his hastile.

 

            Dion took a deep breath. “Right. Well, then. You stay here, tell anyone who tries to go through they can’t on my orders. I’ll go and tell the commander something.” He pinched his nose, and resettled his helmet on his aching head. “I don’t know what. But I’ll think of something.”


	13. Chapter 13

            Jenny eyed the anomaly with disfavour; the ground around it was so marked with boot-prints that even she could tell people had been here. “If the locals have gone through,” she announced, “I will not be responsible for my actions.”

 

            Becker, who was staring at the ruined castle nearby and pulling a face of truly remarkable sourness, heaved a sigh and volunteered to take a look. “If you ask me, anyone that went in there has already come out and is long gone –” he pointed at the tracks, some of which, Jenny conceded, led away from the anomaly – “so it’s probably relatively harmless. Either that, or they’re unusually sensible.”

 

            “Is that likely?” Nick enquired, seeming genuinely interested, but Jenny knew that Nick’s habit of jumping in where angels feared to tread was a subject of considerable contention between Nick and Becker, and she could tell as well as Becker could that Nick was teasing him. She prepared herself to shut them both up.

 

            “I’ll go with you!” Connor said brightly, breaking the tension. Jenny wasn’t sure if he’d done it on purpose, or if he just really wanted to go through the anomaly.

 

            Becker eyed him with suspicion, but he couldn’t take back what he’d just said about the anomaly being relatively harmless. “Stay behind me and Carter,” he said finally. “Let’s go.”

 

            They were gone for barely thirty seconds, and reappeared looking slightly rattled, both soldiers clearly ready to shoot something; Captain Jacobs and his men snapped into the tightest possible circle around the anomaly, and Becker and Carter dragged Connor a decent distance behind the circle.

 

            “Oh God,” Jenny moaned. “What now?”

 

            “Romans,” Becker said briefly. “There was one on the other side, carrying weapons, and he wasn’t happy to see us; tried to chase us back through. But he dropped to his knees when I held a gun on him.”

 

            “Anyone modern?” Captain Jacobs asked, frowning – understandably, Jenny thought, quailing at the idea of trying to rescue a twenty-first century hostage from a Roman encampment.

 

            Luckily, Becker shook his head. “Not that I could see. The snow’s deeper there and there was only one set of tracks, and that was clearly the Roman’s.”

 

            “Bizarre,” Jenny murmured, puzzled, and waited for something to happen. Captain Jacobs and Captain Becker insisted that the civilians should retreat several metres, in case the Romans came through and decided to express their displeasure, but after an hour of waiting had passed, they were allowed to come a little closer and wait for the slowly weakening anomaly to shut. Connor was having trouble with his instruments, for some reason – the screens wouldn’t behave, and the battery life had suddenly dropped like a stone – but he said that the anomaly would close within the next half an hour, and it wasn’t worth the team splitting up, some to return to the youth hostel and others to stay behind and watch the anomaly.

 

            The wind got up, and the few flakes of snow that had been falling as they left the youth hostel disappeared entirely; Jenny considered sheltering by the drystone wall close to them, but it was so clearly crumbling that she didn’t feel it would be safe, and she didn’t want to sit down on the cold, frosty ground anyway. She stamped her feet to get some blood back into them, cast a glance at the shrinking anomaly, and looked around her. The little clump of twisted old trees, the sky that was rapidly clouding over, the drystone wall, the ruined castle –

 

            Wait. Jenny stared at the ruined castle and frowned. It was an immense, tumbledown building off in the distance, turrets decaying before the eye and chunks of stone lying around it where they’d fallen off the haphazard battlements, the structure itself architecturally improbable: it was clearly dangerous, and if the people who’d been fussing around the anomaly were modern and had sneaked off there, they were welcome to it (in Jenny’s opinion). But for just a second, as Jenny’s head had turned, she thought she’d glimpsed the castle whole and entire, the remaining sunlight glinting off its windows and gleaming off the intact roofing tiles, a curious sort of stadium arrangement nearby, and people making their way up towards the castle.

 

            A ragged cheer went up, and Jenny looked round to see empty space where the anomaly had been. She smiled, but uncertainly, remembering the castle she thought she’d seen but _couldn’t_ have seen, because it didn’t exist.

 

            “Back to the youth hostel,” she said brightly, clapping her hands together and forcing the memory out of her mind. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I could really use a cup of tea.”

 

           

            Back at Jackie and Douglas’s youth hostel, changing out of her heavy winter boots into less clumpy shoes for the indoors and setting aside several of the layers she had worn outside, Jenny cleared her throat. “Nick?”

 

            “Mm?” Nick said, rather muffled by the fact that he was doubled over unlacing his own boots.        

           

            “That castle. I thought I saw…”

 

            Nick straightened up and smiled at her. “Thought you saw what, lass?”

 

            “I don’t know,” Jenny confessed, irritated with herself. “But for a second I thought it wasn’t a ruin.”

 

            “Trick of the light, maybe?” Nick suggested, taking her hands in his and drawing her closer.

 

            “Maybe,” Jenny said, glad she hadn’t mentioned the stadium. Nick clearly hadn’t seen a bloody thing.

 

            Nick kissed her lightly on the lips, and Jenny put her arms around him and leaned into him, somewhat comforted. “Let’s get you a cup of tea, Jenny. That’ll sort you out.”

 

            Jenny sighed. “Do you think it’ll get me out of the Christmas party?”

 

            Nick laughed. “Not a bloody chance.”

 

***

 

            Becker held his breath throughout the morning of the 21st, waiting for an anomaly alert to come in that would tie them to the Highlands for at least another two days. Connor and Danny seemed fairly relaxed about the idea – they were both on duty over Christmas, and neither had much family left – but Jenny had taken strongly against the cold and had elaborate Christmas plans, so she wanted to be back in London at once. Nick Cutter, recognising a battle he didn’t want to try to win, was agreeing with her, at least to her face. And he was keeping her just the right side of on-edge, which was good, because Becker found Jenny terrifying most of the time but she was worse than ever when she was annoyed with something.

 

            Most people had collected in the youth hostel’s small breakfast room, which was the only real communal space it had and was filled to capacity when the anomaly team all squeezed in. The weather outside was lousy, cold and grey with the snow on the ground hardening to ice, and Connor had turned the heating on full. Finn had already managed to burn himself on the radiator, which – being painted the same pastel blue as the walls – blended in somewhat, but that was the only excitement. Danny had found a stack of dubious crime thrillers lent out to visitors by Jackie, and shredded the police procedure to anyone who would listen. Jenny left the room to engage in a conference call with Claudia in her and Nick’s room, and Nick and Connor worked on a paper. Becker cleaned all his equipment, just because it was good practice, and watched the way that Connor’s dark eyes focussed on his work, a tiny thinking frown between his eyebrows. Jenny came back in at one point and disrupted his view, Nick dropping the hand that had been thoughtfully rubbing over his chin as Connor explained a point he’d made and looking up to smile at her with warm blue eyes. Connor, who was evidently used to being upstaged by Jenny, just waited for Jenny to get the answer to her question and walk out again before resuming his sentence. To do him credit, Cutter picked up exactly where they’d left off.

 

            Cutter and Jenny looked like they were in love, Becker thought, was surprised at himself, and then realised he was jealous, a revelation that caused him to knock a bottle of gun oil over. He caught it just in time, heart thundering in his ears – and not because he might have stained Jackie and Douglas’s rather thin carpet.

 

            “Butterfingers,” Danny said, hardly pausing in his condemnation of bad interrogation practices.

 

            Becker flipped Danny off, and Connor snorted. Nick just shook his head, and called Connor’s attention to a lacuna in their paper. Jenny came back into the room again, this time bearing a parliamentary white paper, a biro and a highlighter, and claimed a corner of a sofa to rest on while she did her own work. The four soldiers who had previously been occupying it shuffled obediently out of her way.

 

            The morning passed quietly, without the anomaly they’d all been waiting for, and Claudia rang Jenny to recall them to London. The team scattered at once, going to collect bags and work, and Becker joined them, going back up to the room he had shared with Connor to fetch his own small weekend bag. He’d kept it packed, of course. Connor had not done the same, and his things were spread across most of the room the way Connor had sprawled over most of the bed, inadvertently maddening Becker. Connor, therefore, was scrambling around the room throwing things into his rucksack, and Becker hung back in the doorway to give him some space.

 

            “Sorry, sorry,” Connor said. “Just one second – are these your boxers or mine?”

 

            “Yours,” Becker said. “They’ve got holly on.”

 

            Connor gave the underpants in question a harassed look, and an enlightened expression spread over his face. “Oh, yeah. Of course.” He gave Becker a sheepish look. “Sorry, mate. I just – I reckoned there would be another anomaly, you know?”

 

            Becker smiled and came into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. Out of habit, he straightened the bed’s covers. “No, I know.”

 

            “It would be kind of cool to be here over Christmas,” Connor said unexpectedly, stuffing the boxers and a hoodie into the rucksack. “I mean… I haven’t really got family to spend it with, and you know - I like my job, and -” he shrugged, eyes darting around the room, resting on the spider’s web in the corner, the textured off-white paint on the walls, the lumpy mattress they’d shared, anywhere but Becker – “company’s good?”

 

            “I’m flattered,” Becker said, something small and warm taking up residence in the centre of his chest. “Unfortunately, I am seeing family over Christmas, so I wouldn’t want to stay here – but I enjoyed your company, too.”

 

            Connor flushed unexpectedly pink, smiling, and opened his mouth to say something, but then there was a knock on the door and both their heads swung round towards its source.

 

            “Connor? Captain Becker?” Cutter’s voice, easygoing for once, Scottish accent thicker after their week up north. “We’re hoping to head off, and Jenny’s getting just that bit impatient.” Pause. “You don’t want to know what Quinn’s saying.”

 

            “Quinn,” Becker repeated, and swore. He looked over at Connor, who had his rucksack in one hand and his washbag in the other, frozen to the spot, and swung his own bag onto his shoulder. “I’ll go and shut him up. You finish off here.”

 

            “Thanks.” Connor grinned and bobbed his head, running a hand through his black hair at the nape of his own neck. ”

 

            Becker nodded, and headed for the door.

 

            “Looking forward to the Christmas party?” Connor blurted, as if he’d meant to say something else.

 

            Becker turned and smiled at him. “Can’t wait,” he said, and slipped out of the door before his mouth could get any further ahead of his brain.

 

***

 

            The crumpled pieces of parchment glowed blue, and Caroline felt as if she’d been turned inside out, and then they were standing in Epping Forest instead of the Headmistress’s office, every face vaguely nauseous and discombobulated – apart, of course, from Captain Ryan’s, since he always looked perfectly comfortable.

 

            Caroline cleared her throat, and got everyone’s attention. “Right, everyone. Lester’s out of the office now, so there’s no point returning for a debrief. Aurors, you know whether or not you need to visit the armoury, everyone else – Lester says he’ll see us tomorrow morning for work, and wants full reports on his desk by the end of tomorrow.”

 

            The team dissolved into chatter as everyone worked out what they needed to do next, and Caroline found Sarah and Abby at her elbows.

 

            “Fancy getting supper?” Sarah asked, smiling. “Abby and I were thinking of getting Muggle pizza to take away.”

 

            Abby’s face was a study in amusement and despair. “It’s just pizza, Sarah. Pizza is pizza is pizza. I’m pretty sure wizards make pizza too.”

 

            “But not Domino’s,” Sarah said reasonably.

 

            Caroline smiled. “I’d like that, actually.”

 

            “Oh, good!” Sarah said. “I wonder if Stephen and Ryan –” she looked round – “oh, no, maybe not…”

 

            Caroline glanced around the taller woman to see Stephen and Ryan standing close to each other and talking very intensely, and she smiled again. “Let’s make it a girls’ pizza night.”  


            “Cool,” Abby said, smiling herself.

 

           

            They were walking back to Sarah and Abby’s flat, pizza boxes in hand – Sarah had insisted on stopping in an alleyway to charm them to retain heat – when Sarah said suddenly: “You know, we should have a party.”

 

            “What?” Abby said, sounding baffled.

 

            “Christmas party!” Sarah said encouragingly. “There’s plenty of room at the flat. Celebrate the end of the year, Hogwarts’ wards not being totally wrecked by anomalies, Stephen and Ryan getting their act together, me not braining that idiot Hufflepuff for lurking around trying to work out what I was doing in the library…”

 

            Abby blinked, opened her mouth, shut it again, and then looked at Caroline. “What do you think?”

 

            Caroline nearly dropped her pizza. “Me?”

 

            “No, the giant squid. Yes, you, Caroline, obviously!”

 

            Caroline rolled her eyes, and applied a few seconds’ thought to the question, both in terms of potential social ramifications and the budget in the petty cash that could be stretched to helping with food and drink. “I think it could be fun,” she said at last. “If you’re really sure you want to host, Sarah?”

 

            “Of course we’ll do it,” Sarah said confidently, and Abby nodded.

 

            “Yeah, then,” Caroline said. “Why not?”


	14. Chapter 14

            Sarah was flushed and bright-eyed when she opened the door, a paper crown askew on her loose dark hair. “Stephen!” She flung her arms around Stephen, and gave Ryan a similarly extravagant hug. “I’m so glad you came! You look traumatised, have a drink.”

 

            She stuffed a glass of something that fizzed into Stephen’s hand and ushered them both into the flat; Stephen exchanged a startled glance with Ryan, whose eyes were laughing. He’d expected the exuberance of Sarah’s welcome, but not that of her interior decorating: the place was saturated in tinsel and fairy lights, mistletoe hanging in liberal hanks from the ceiling, and the tree in the corner practically glowed. Christmas music was playing quietly in the background; Muggle pop standards. Abby must have had a hand in that.

 

            “You think this is loud,” Abby said, coming over to greet them, “you should have seen it before I got involved. Sarah wanted actual fairies. I put my foot down.”

 

            “Grounds of animal welfare?” Ryan asked, accepting Abby’s slightly more reserved hug. Stephen wiped his wet shoes on the doormat – it had snowed while they were away in Scotland, causing pundits and small children to get overexcited, and was snowing lightly again, just enough to crust the pavement – and took his coat off, carefully not spilling his glass of fizz in the process.

 

            “Not so much that as the fact that they crap everywhere and get lost in curtains and cupboards. You haven’t got a drink.”

 

            “Can’t stand fizzy stuff,” Ryan said, although Stephen was very much enjoying the glass he had to hand. He thought it was probably good cava, rather than bad champagne, but didn’t mean to ask in case it turned out to be ancient sparkling elf-made wine or something – perfectly possible, considering the way Sarah’s flat telegraphed Old Wizarding Money. “And before you say Butterbeer-”

 

            Abby shook her head, laughing the laugh that crinkled up her whole face with genuine joy and made her look like a very happy baby chipmunk. “There’s a box of ordinary Muggle beer in the kitchen.”

 

            Ryan followed Abby out of the room, and Stephen edged further into the party.

 

            “Mind the carpet,” Caroline said casually, drifting over, “it flies. Lester gesticulated in the wrong way five minutes ago while standing on it and went flying, I’ve never seen anything so funny.”

 

            Stephen glanced down, registered the beautiful blue and violet patterned carpet under his feet, and snorted at the idea of it whisking Lester off the floor. Lester, now leaning against the broom rack and deep in discussion with Sarah, did look a little more dishevelled than usual, and had a vague air of defensiveness that he’d often worn after the ARC team had done something particularly ridiculous. “So I take it you’re on over New Year, if he caught you laughing?”

 

            Caroline grinned, tugging slightly at her cinnamon dress to make the hem fall a little better. It was covered in bronze sparkles which caught the light, and Stephen was fairly certain that Sarah was watching the way the sparkles glimmered along Caroline’s slender figure. “I am anyway, but he didn’t notice. Lyle was having hysterics.”

 

            Stephen grinned. “Everyone here?”

 

            Caroline sipped at her drink and nodded. “Nearly everyone,” she said. “Some of the Aurors are playing darts in the kitchen, but only a few of them came. The ones who know Ryan well or who were temporarily on the Muggle project, I think.”

 

            Stephen nodded, and leant against the side of a sofa, cherry-picking salt and vinegar crisps from a bowl on the side.

 

            “It was interesting to see them work,” Caroline said, stealing a carrot baton. Stephen suspected Abby had just gone to Tesco’s and cleared them out of finger food.

 

            “What, the ARC?”

 

            Abby came back into the living room, still talking to Ryan, who caught Stephen’s eye from across the room and smiled, raising his can of beer very slightly to toast Stephen. Stephen couldn’t not smile back, and raise his glass in a matching toast.

 

            “Yes,” Caroline said, watching them and smiling into the rim of her glass. “I’ve met them before, of course –”

 

            “I know,” Stephen said dryly, remembering how excited Connor had been to have a girlfriend who was undeniably beautiful, undeniably interested in him, and undeniably interested in some of the things he liked. “Connor told me all about you.”

 

            Caroline flushed slightly, but carried on. “-but then I was, well, interfering, really.”

 

            “You could say that.” Stephen finished his drink and put the glass down, before deciding to take mercy on Caroline, who had definitely suffered enough on this account from Abby. “Yeah, they were… they were working really well together, and they seemed happy, it was nice. Nick and Jenny look happy together.”

 

            “Was that a thing before you left?”

 

            Stephen shook his head, and waited for the lump in his throat that he expected to appear when he thought too hard about Cutter and the team, but it never materialised. He wondered what the hell Sarah put in her drinks. “Nick fancied her, but he’d been flirting with her younger half-sister, who’s now become their boss. So it took a while to win her over, I think.”

 

            “Circe’s knickers,” Caroline said, opal eyes faintly awed and appalled. “Talk about keeping it in the family.”

 

            Much to his own surprise, Stephen sniggered. “There’s that. But they seem… comfortable together, and Connor’s got that captain, what’s his name –”

 

            “Becker.”

 

            “Becker, yeah. Who looks sort of, well. Head over heels for him.” Stephen crunched another crisp.

 

            “He deserves to be happy,” Caroline said absently, prodding the flying carpet with one wary toe as if she thought it might take flight beneath them. “I always thought he was sweet.” She lifted her head and shook her black corkscrew curls back, so that her long bronze earrings danced. “There’s something about anomalies, isn’t there?”

 

            Stephen followed her gaze over to the group on the other side of the room, where Lester had been talking to Sarah. Sarah had now gone through into the kitchen – Stephen could hear her berating Niall Richards for throwing a dart _through_ the dartboard  - and Ryan had taken her place, with Lyle joining the pair to stand beside Lester and grope him really unsubtly. Whatever they were talking about, Lyle was smirking in a way that suggested it was distinctly smutty, and Lester was laughing. Stephen had not previously thought this possible.

 

            “You mean Lester and Lyle?” he said.

 

            Caroline swallowed the remains of a carrot baton and shook her head. “I meant you and Captain Ryan.” She gave him a wicked smirk. “How long has that been a thing? I mean, the sexual tension between the two of you has been palpable for months, but arriving together –”

 

            Stephen felt his face and ears heat, and knew he’d gone fire-engine red; he wasn’t surprised when Abby came over.

 

            “You look like a lobster, Stephen,” she said, grinning. “Caroline, what the hell are you telling him?”

 

            “Asking him about him and Ryan,” Caroline said promptly.

 

            “There’s nothing to tell,” Stephen said, still bright red, and Abby and Caroline caught each other’s eye and burst out laughing, attracting the attention of everyone in the room. Stephen started down into his wine glass and wished he had another one.

 

            “Stephen,” Abby managed. “You’ve got a love-bite on your neck. You know that, right?”

 

            “Er,” Stephen prevaricated, having all too clear an idea of where that love-bite was located, and exactly how he’d acquired it. Arriving together had obviously been the massive giveaway he’d suspected it would be. “Insect bite?”

 

            “Maybe if the insect was called Tom Ryan,” Caroline teased.

 

            “Midges,” Stephen said. “Scotland’s full of them.”

 

            “That’s not a very nice thing to say about Ryan!”

 

            Stephen gave up on them both, and went into the kitchen, where he found Ryan mending the dartboard and reprimanding Richards, who was reducing red peppers to matchstick-like shapes and letting the reproof roll off him like water off a duck’s back. Sarah was sitting on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs and grinning and sipping more of the fizzy wine from her glass.

 

            “Is there any more of that?” Stephen said, raising his glass. “It’s good.”

 

            “Thanks!” Sarah said brightly. “And yes, of course there is, especially if you and Ryan help me get in the curry I ordered.”

 

            “Curry?”

 

            “Yep! Followed by Christmas cake.” Sarah flicked a casual hand at an immense chocolate log covered in chocolate holly leaves.

 

            “Looks delicious,” Stephen said. “We won’t need to eat for a week.”

 

            The doorbell rang with a cacophony the likes of which Stephen had never previously heard, and reduced everyone but Sarah and Abby’s CD player to perfect silence. Ryan had dropped the dartboard and drawn his wand, and Richards looked as if he was prepared to stab someone with Sarah’s kitchen knives.

 

            “What the fuck was that?” Lyle eventually said from the living room, very loudly.

 

            “Doorbell!” Sarah called, hopping off the kitchen counter. “It always does that. That must be the curry. Stephen, Ryan, would you-”

 

            “Yes, of course,” Stephen said, recollecting himself, and Ryan slid his wand away with a slightly sheepish look, before they grabbed their coats and followed Sarah out of the flat and downstairs, dodging somebody’s escaped Chocolate Frog on the way.

 

            The takeaway guy standing outside in the snow was evidently a Muggle, from the way Sarah interacted with him, although she did at least manage to pay in the correct currency (Stephen had his hands in his pockets in case she heaved out a Galleon or two). Sarah and Abby had ordered enough for an army, a mix of curries and sides, and it all smelled delicious; Stephen mentally earmarked the lamb rogan josh. Then Sarah darted back inside, claiming to be freezing already, and Ryan and Stephen only just managed to get in behind her. She dashed up the stairs, and Ryan and Stephen followed a little more slowly. Then Ryan stopped, for some reason, just ahead of Stephen on the stairs, and smiled down at him.

 

            Stephen smiled back. “Something wrong?”

 

            “No,” Ryan said, and leaned down slightly to kiss him on the lips, brief because of the endless cardboard and foil boxes they were carrying, but sweet, all the same. “Happy Christmas, Stephen.”

 

            “You’re going to see me on actual Christmas Day, remember?” Stephen said, suddenly worried. He’d had no Christmas plans until Ryan had incorporated him into his, and he had been quietly looking forward to the day, hoping it would be better than the last one, knowing it would be, with Ryan involved.

 

            “I know,” Ryan said. “I’m feeling festive, Hart, don’t knock it.”

 

            Stephen grinned, inexpressibly relieved. “Until I’ve tried it? I try doing Christmas all the time, I’m not the one who sulks about carols and thinks you should take the tree down on Boxing Day.”  
  


            Ryan snorted and shook his head. “If you can even call that pot-plant in a corner of your flat a tree. I’ll make you a deal, Hart, you can keep the tree up over the holiday as long as you can distract me from taking it down.”

 

            Stephen gave Ryan a long, slow look up and down, and what he knew to be an incendiary grin. “Challenge accepted.”

 

            “Hey, lovebirds!” Abby called from her and Sarah’s floor, leaning over the banister to shout down. Stephen could hear Caroline and Sarah giggling in the background, and Caroline saying something like ‘I told you so’. “Hurry up and bring the food! Everyone else is starving.”

 

            “And a merry Christmas to you, too!” Ryan shouted back.

 

            Stephen laughed.

 

***

           

            Jenny had to admit that Claudia and Lorraine had done a good job of turning the atrium into a Christmas party venue, despite – or perhaps because – of the absence of the people who had been keenest on the party. By the time they’d made it back to London, Jenny’s annoyance at the idea of a Christmas party full of forced cheerfulness had run out of steam, and Connor’s enthusiasm was infectious. The morning before the party, Jenny had been sufficiently resigned to it to smile reluctantly when Nick put an arm around her waist and murmured “Admit it, lass, you’re looking forward to it,” at breakfast.

 

            Some things, however, she was not prepared to tolerate. “No,” she said firmly, warding off Connor and a moth-eaten Santa hat. “Certainly not. Give it to Danny.”

 

            Connor scampered off and dumped the Santa hat on Becker’s head, where it slid down over his eyes, earning a ripe oath and an expression of maddened confusion. Jenny honestly couldn’t blame Danny for photographing him, regardless of the spat that inevitably blew up in the photograph’s wake.

 

            “Have some Christmas spirit, Jenny,” Nick said cheerfully, and Jenny turned to give him a piece of her mind, only to find that he was holding out a glass of punch. She took it from him and sipped at it, smiling: rich, warm, fruity, and undoubtedly spiked.

 

            “For a moment, I thought that was an instruction,” she remarked, and Nick’s cornflower blue eyes widened.

 

            “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I like my balls where they are, thanks.”

 

            Jenny laughed and tapped her glass against his. “Cheers. Is it spiked?”

 

            “Almost certainly,” Nick said, glancing over the other side of the atrium as a roar went up. Becker had lost patience, floored Danny, and jammed the Santa hat onto his head so hard that it had wound up at nose height. He was now sitting on Danny’s back deleting the pictures from his phone, and didn’t look even slightly ruffled by the scrap. Connor was laughing so hard he could barely stand, hanging onto the ARC’s tinsel-covered frame, and almost knocking over one of the speakers playing Christmas carols that had been attached to it.

 

            “Whatever happened to peace on earth and goodwill to all men?” Claudia called from the balcony, which had been liberally wrapped in fairy lights. She was probably trying to sound stern and Lesterish, but half-laughing, relaxed and dressed for the party in a ruby-red wrap dress that was much softer-edged than her new work wardrobe, she only came off as amused. It didn’t help that she hadn’t refused a Santa hat.

 

            Becker got up and peeled Danny off the floor. “Sorry, ma’am.”

 

            Claudia shook her head and started to make her way downstairs, followed by Lorraine, who had probably had to be surgically removed from her desk. A tray of mince pies went past, carried by a technician, and Nick nabbed a couple and handed Jenny one.

 

            “Thanks,” Jenny said, juggling handbag, punch glass and now mince pie. It was good; someone had taken the trouble to get them out of their supermarket boxes, plate them up and heat them, the same way someone had taken the trouble to set up a tree in a space where it wouldn’t disturb the mammoth’s enclosure and decorate it liberally – half the chocolate baubles wrapped in gaudy foil were already gone – the same way that someone, somehow, had strung paper chains from the ceiling. Jenny smiled, and leant back against Nick as she ate her mince pie, eyes ranging over the party in progress. The ARC’s small PR department were chatting with the equally miniature legal department, probably commiserating over their various woes; all of them looked brighter when they weren’t being expected to repel boarders with very expensive lawyers. The soldiers, Danny, and the younger and more reckless end of the science contingent seemed to be playing some kind of game with shots, probably Truth or Dare, and the rest of the scientists seemed to have gathered into small groups by subject and were gossiping like fiends about people they all knew. Claudia was making polite small talk with a bespectacled accountant, and Lorraine had temporarily disappeared.

 

            “Nick!” came an imperative voice from off to one side, and Nick and Jenny turned as one to see one of the other palaeontologists approaching – a woman called Tegan Williams, who specialised in earlier time periods than Nick favoured. “Nick, is it true you wrote that anonymous review of Pennyforth’s book?”  

 

            “Aye,” Nick said, looking vaguely smug. Jenny eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

 

            “You vicious old bastard,” Tegan Williams said, voice full of approval as she flicked her long brown plait over her shoulder. “It was such a hatchet job! Pennyforth is furious.”

 

            “Then he shouldn’t have written a book so full of holes,” Nick replied, now grinning openly.

 

            Jenny rolled her eyes, but smiled; it was nice to see Nick enjoying himself.

 

            “Ciarán was at a dinner he was at yesterday,” Tegan said. “Apparently he was saying the wildest things about the ‘anonymous reviewer’ –” Tegan’s blunt pale fingers crooked like apostrophes, sloshing the contents of the punch glass in one hand half out of the glass – “you’ve got to come and hear, Nick. Jenny, may I borrow him?”

 

            “Go ahead,” Jenny laughed, hoicking her handbag a little higher up her shoulder as Nick followed Tegan over to a small knot of scientists, including Connor, where a stocky young man with a mop of brownish hair was describing something his audience evidently found hilarious. Jenny turned away, located Lorraine, and went over to join her; the PA was helping herself to a selection of buffet foods on a table spread with a plastic snowman tablecloth. Some of the food looked home-made, and some of it, like the mince pies, was clearly shop-bought. Lorraine looked up and smiled a little as Jenny came over.

 

            “I recommend the tandoori chicken.”

 

            “It does look good,” Jenny said, and begun to load up a plate. She was hungry; despite her best efforts, work had built up while she was in Scotland, and she had skipped lunch to work steadily throughout the day. Lorraine had brought her a sandwich at the same time she’d stepped out to get some lunch for herself, but Jenny had hardly touched it.

 

            “This must have been a lot of work for you,” she said casually to Lorraine as they moved away from the buffet table.

 

            Lorraine shrugged and looked faintly uncomfortable. “Not really. Everyone was quite keen to help, once they found out what was going on.” She nodded at the buffet table. “People brought a lot of food in. And enough alcohol to fill a swimming pool.”

 

            “I noticed _that_ ,” Jenny said. She had gone down to the rec room to get herself a glass of water and been brought up short by the boxes of beer and cheap wine stacked halfway to the ceiling. To say nothing of the moonshine which had probably gone into the punch.

 

            Lorraine smiled and looked down at her feet. “I had a lot of help with the decorations, as well.” She pointed upwards, and Jenny obediently glanced up, to where the multi-coloured paper chains criss-crossed the ceiling. “The ADD technicians made those, and the soldiers hung them.”

 

            “Good grief,” Jenny said. There must be nearly fifty metres of chain up there. “How bored do the technicians _get_?”

 

            Lorraine nearly laughed. Jenny wondered if she thought that showing stronger emotion would sprain something.

 

            “Hello Jenny,” Claudia said, and Jenny felt something settle on her head. She reached up warily, and found that it was a paper crown rather than a manky Santa hat, so let it be.

 

            “Hello Claudia. Where did you get this from?”

 

            “The lads are pulling crackers,” Claudia said; she was pink-cheeked and smiley, probably with joie de vivre rather than punch, and had a yellow plastic clip in her loose hair, probably from the same cracker.

 

            There was a loud burst of laughter, and they all looked around to see that Nick’s audience had grown from a few palaeontologists to most of the scientists and a few technicians; he was gesticulating and half-smiling in that crooked, sideways way that meant he was deeply amused, and the people around him clearly found whatever he was talking about just as funny. Connor was listening and laughing, puppyish face alight, and Becker was listening too – although in Becker’s case, he seemed to be enjoying Nick’s recital for the fact that it made Connor laugh, more than anything else.

 

            Jenny looked back to find that Claudia’s smile had turned quiet and triumphant, and she raised an eyebrow at her half-sister.

 

            “Not bad, is it?” Claudia said, tucking her hair behind one ear and helping herself to some of the potato salad on Jenny’s plate. “When you think where we were this time last year.”

 

            Jenny blinked, automatically moved her plate out of Claudia’s reach, and thought, eyes staring across the room without seeing, about the anomaly project this time last year. Claudia, still finding her feet as an insanely young CEO; Nick, half shut down with grief and moral confusion; Connor, reeling privately and desperately trying to patch up the cracks in the ARC; Abby and Stephen, both gone – one way or the other – for good. Jenny knew as well as anyone that they had been struggling. And here they were now, brighter and happier, a little more healed and a lot more in control.

 

            Nick caught her eye and smiled at her, and Jenny smiled back. She clinked her glass with Claudia’s and Lorraine’s, and raised it in a toast.

 

            “Not bad at all,” she said.

 


End file.
